Quotes from Cathy Holton

I can't just open myself up the way some people can. And down here, you're raised a certain way. You're taught to keep some things private, family matters especially. It's just the way it's done. Everyone worships the past but no one really wants to talk about it.

Everyone has a different story, and you have to ask yourself what motivates people to see reality the way they do.

Sitting down in the evenings became a kind of torture, a bleak realization of her talents laid out against the bright shimmering fabric of her dreams. Yet she couldn't stop, she couldn't give up so easily. To stop writing completely produced in her a bleak and relentless depression, so she stubbornly persisted, plodding through endless drafts and revisions, telling herself she was learning something each time.

Death smoothes the rough edges, obliterates the cruelties of the deceased. It makes heroes of monsters.

It was one way she had found to fill her solitary childhood, but it was more than that; the act of creation gave substance and shape to her life. It made order out of the chaos.

Yet she couldn't help herself. She couldn't stop writing. She was like a medium receiving messages from the dead.

You're just about as sweet and handy as a Braille Bible to a blind preacher." Virginia

But there was a different kind too, a slow, quiet contentment that built gradually over time, a feeling based on trust and fortitude, on the shared experiences of raising children, on grief and hardship and joy.

Being addicted to soft-porn romance novels in Ithaca, Georgia, was like filling a prescription for head lice or genital herpes. It just wasn't the kind of thing you went around bragging about, not if you were a good Southern girl, anyway, from a good Southern family.