Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them,

At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.

You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world.

You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless. Mainly by getting there first yourself.

I was learning to love the brutal burnt screw-you taste of that word I’d been given to eat forever. Sorry.

They both had the look that comes of hard living, clothes and skin all the same drab color of washed-out leather.

Nobody looks you in the eye whenever they’re leaving you flat.

you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.

There’s a million roads a person like me can take to ruin, and none I’d found so far led anywhere else.

Dori’s voice was like a low-running creek, deeper than you’d expect.

Pain can scramble you. If it is weather, it can be a storm tearing off the roof of your mind. The hours and days after that tackle are like a deck of shuffled cards.

don’t look for money to buy your life back,

If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless.

You can’t choose your family, but a partner is your shot at a decent do-over.

Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

Guilty, curious, who knows what brings people out to view the dead.

She was not in the business of throwing her life away so other people can stay shitfaced.

We all want what we’re used to.

It’s a level of death, knowing another body that well, that’s touched every part of yours, thinking about it now cold in the ground.

a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.