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I think of us more as flowers in the attic.
I believed all of life would be like one long and perfect summer day.
We weren’t rich, we weren’t poor.
“Come greet me with kisses if you love me!”
On Fridays, Momma spent half the day in the beauty parlor having her hair shampooed and set and her fingernails polished,
everything she did to turn herself from just a pretty woman into a creature so ravishingly beautiful she didn’t look real.
Why did he and Momma have to go and send for more children? Weren’t two enough?
She lived next door, and was always saying Momma and Daddy looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife.
I hated cabbage.
something warm and motherly replaced the green in my eyes.
We had a funny surname, the very devil to learn to spell. Dollanganger.
Never had a room full of people stilled so quickly.
Despair washed the radiant color from her beautiful face; it resembled a death mask.
Not Daddy! Not my daddy!
Death was for old people, sick people . . . not for somebody as loved ...
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“Our days are numbered . . . that’s the way it is, from the day we’re born, our days are numbered.”
Everything was blackened and charred by smoke and fire.
they hadn’t even had the chance to know how wonderful he was—or had been.
It’s not good to be alone when you feel bereft. It’s better to be with people and share your grief, and not keep it locked up inside.”
I hated it every time someone asked how he died, and what a pity someone so young should die,
fate was a grim reaper, never kind, with little respect for who was loved and needed.
grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away,
“there are some mothers you just can’t love, for they don’t want you to love them.”
We were four children stumbling around in the broken pieces of our grief and loss.
gibbering back and forth in the strange language only they could understand.
They built a wall about themselves so they were the castle-keeps, and full guardians of their larder of secrets.
Did we look frightened? Scared?
Already I was sinking, drowning in the adult world of death and debts.
Was I a windowpane, so easy to read, that even he, my arch-tormentor, would seek to comfort me?
We can’t take along more than four suitcases, and I need two for my own things.”
Even in her grief, wearing black, she was beautiful—shadowed, troubled eyes and all.
How we all loved her then.
And then we learn even our own last name wasn’t really ours.
they were too young to understand,
It dawned on me strongly then, that our parents had lived full lives even before they had children, that we were not so important after all.
I am a pretty, useless ornament who always believed she’d have a man to take care of her.
You can’t live without money. It’s not love that makes the world go ’round—it’s money.
That’s the way rich people lived—happily ever after as they counted their money and made their fun plans.
