You don't want to be comforted, do you? he asks, sadly. You'd rather be guilty. You know they made up the idea of original sin not to punish but to console us. When all the incomprehensible shit goes...
Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.
[N]ames were what you wore forever, and she felt that she'd sent her daughters out in tacky rabbit fur coats when they should have been wrapped in mink.
Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment.
It's the greatest of Southern honors . . . to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given.
No woman kills herself for love, and rarely for shame. It is the cruelty of hope that does a woman in; for no matter how many men a woman has given herself to, she never holds her life cheap until she...
He makes her feel halfway normal by being so much further beyond her.
If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white...
The women are drinking and laughing inside somewhere, Wallis guesses, as manless as these men are without women.
Life must have sucked growing up without TV. Back then people could wait a few days to learn about all the things they couldn't control. . . Nowadays we're much more impatient for our impotence.
He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age.
None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin.
All the Baptist churches she's ever visited smelled of the same sweat and boredom.
I learned something in the years I spent among suicide bombers. . . The boys and girls who are willing to blow up their lives are not the true believers. They are the ones in agonies of doubt. There i...
Polly had always marveled . . . that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product [American cheese] after itself, yet hungry Rose . . . gleefully ate every individually wrapped, plast...
Secrets are always hardest at the beginning. After a while they settle in like the cavities in your teeth, and you only think about them when they hurt.
This is what making love must be like, she thinks. At twelve years old, she understands little more than that it will begin with loss - the loss of virginity, the loss of innocence - but that at some...
God must feel the same at the end of a long day. Stop trying to make Me happy with all that ritual up and down, all the good works and psychic genuflecting. All the good works in the world will not br...
[H]e went ahead and named them without her, pulling from the spiral notebook of names they'd been collecting, putting together first and middle names with no rhyme or reason . . . names that obviously...
