Quotes from Karen Abbott

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

War, like politics, was men's work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women's loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself

Mother was,' June thought, 'a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.' Her broken edges cut her daughters in ways both emotional and physical, and only sharpened with age.

Her mother was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any idea how to fix.

Well, just remember this. When my ma got me, she picked what she wanted. But when your ma got you, she had to take what she got.

A Republican is a man who wants you to go t'church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.

He was just a taker. She was a taker in her way too. They were taking each other, and they loved each other for that. -June Havoc

And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.

He spent all of his twenty-three years operating at only one speed and in one direction, furious and forward, convinced that a collision could only improve the ride.

As one prominent obstetrician put it, "Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen's hands are clean.

Why the devil they have to put that 'girlie girlie' tea party description every time they tell anything a professional woman does, is more than I can see.

There was work for everyone to do, even the women—especially the women. They had to adjust quickly to the sudden absence of fathers and husbands and sons, to the idea that things would never be as they had been. They had no vote, no straightforward access to political discourse, no influence in how the battles were waged. Instead they took control of homes, businesses, plantations.

In a late interview, Belle herself characterized her life as if it were one long sin that needed to be confessed—with one pointed exception. "I have lied, sworn, killed (I guess) and I have stolen," she said. "But . . . I thank God that I can say on my death bed that I am a virtuous woman. . . . Fortune has played me a sad trick by letting me live on and on.

a girl can't lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.

Frank, as he preferred to be called, always believed that God was with him, protecting him even during—perhaps especially during—his transgressions.

I do not mind mankind's crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy.

You had to hand it to those reformers: They concocted better stories than the ones at the nickel theaters.

Peculiar behavior only invited unwarranted suspicion.

Later, the sisters would remember things differently, as sisters do, old grudges and misunderstandings refracting each memory, bending them in opposite directions.

They never found Captain Henry, but Samuel finally got his answer from Belle: Yes, she said, she would be his wife. She believed that God had intended them to "meet and love," and that He had purposely sent her a Yankee, a Union boy from Brooklyn. "Women," she reasoned, "can sometimes work wonders; and may not he, who is of Northern birth, come by degrees to love, for my sake, the ill-used South?

Start thinkin' about what you're goin' to be tomorrow—not what you were yesterday." For

he insisted, since he'd earned something more useful than a GED—a GE, his "gutter education." He