Quotes About Judgment

People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.

She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, Irene, you don't know how becoming that looks. As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.

Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn't matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save white-trash orphans.

When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we're meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don't pertain.

You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.

Ugly as homemade sin.

There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that's on you.

Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people

The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we're all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.

the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better.

Poor thing, thought Garnett, to have to commit yourself so hard to one moment of poor judgment.

Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.

If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn't technically hold it against me.

Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.

I took Mom's word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there's no liquor to be found.

why, he very nearly almost looked handsome. If you could ignore the telltale signs that he is a certified creep.

I'm just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks.

half the town would claim they'd seen it coming, just because they thrived on downfalls of any sort.

She said okay. Probably she thought I was growing up to be one more prick in her life, a junior-varsity Stoner. It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap.

Most families would sooner forgive you for going to prison than for moving out of