Quotes from Judy Reene Singer

Secrets are like plants. They can stay buried deep in the earth for a long time, but eventually they'll send up shoots and give themselves away. They have to. It's their nature. Just a tiny green stem at first. Which slowly, insidiously grows taller, stronger, unfolding itself, until there it is. A big fat secret, right in front of your face; a fully bloomed flower perfumed with the scent of deception.

She keeps herself in a constant state of unhappiness, so she is never disappointed by life.

You never know what you can do," he says, "until you get it done.

Child, you're just flying blind, and it's okay. That's how life is, darlin'. We're all flying blind.

You can have all the sympathy in the world," she said, "just don't feel like you have to wrap your life around it.

H OW LONG can you sleepwalk through your life? A few weeks? A few years? Ten or twenty years, if you're not paying attention? I

Alabama sun was really something, Willie thought, it was really something. It battered you, enshrouded you, like it had made a pact with hell and humidity to bring you to your knees.

We poison ourselves and we poison each other. A cruel remark, the turn of a shoulder, the indifference to someone's pain. I remember how often I flinched under my father's comments, but I never realized how much it could fester, infiltrate in its insidious, toxic way, through his life my life, a family. A culture.

There are losses that etch themselves forever, deep into your soul, and losses that can be replaced," he said, very softly. "Peace of mind comes when you learn to tell the two apart.