Quotes from Sheri Holman

Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.

It's the greatest of Southern honors . . . to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given.

Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.

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 foolishly believed it to be valued.

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.

None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin.

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.

All the Baptist churches she's ever visited smelled of the same sweat and boredom.

the women are drinking and laughing inside somewhere, Wallis guesses, as manless as these men are without women.

He makes her feel halfway normal by being so much further beyond her.

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 is always someone with nothing to prove who buckles the belt around them.

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 bring you and closer to Me. Stand still. Let Me look at you and find Myself reflected. Maybe for a brief moment, you thought it was all about you, but surprise, Creation. It is all about Me.

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 down, we can blame ourselves, it was something we did or didn't do. Without guilt, we are irrelevant. And that is so much worse.

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 trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age.

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, plastic little one of them.

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 point there stands to be a gain.

What do women know of war? Tucker had flung at her the other day. You are never called upon to kill. Sonia slowly walks away from the small light of the kitchen, headed toward the car. No, we are never called upon, she thinks. We are merely conscripted at birth.

He told me there was no past. Or should I say, that the past is always on and waiting.

Nature does not provide one nerve without pairing it a second, he'd said. She invests us with two lungs, two kidneys, two eyes, two ears. The singular brain is divided into identical hemispheres; the heart has two corresponding auricles and ventricles. We are paired creatures, mourns Henry. He took the dress lodger's baby. She took his beloved in return. He should have realized: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Even revenge is paired.

and yet, the only thing about this year, he thinks, the only times that he has been completely honest with himself are on the nights he's spent here. Only among the crowd of the failed has he felt comfortable living inside his own defeat.