More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Maybe that was why she’d not been taught her sums: Then she’d know her own damn worth, to the penny.
Being alone wasn’t so bad when nothing ever changed, but now Nettie didn’t trust herself, and she was generally the only person she could trust.
The things that happened at night flat out didn’t have the guts to take place under the watchful sun.
“Names are just skins to wear for a while.
She inhaled the wind and breathed out fire, sucked in life and spit out the bones.
crazy as a bag of cats,
Nothing is pure. Everything is a half-breed.” “But nobody calls a white man that.” “No one pokes the biggest, dumbest bull in the herd, but no one follows him, either,”
What was so horrible about being a girl that everyone felt the need to force them into skirts and tether them to ovens and children? Who had decided that women couldn’t ride astride and proud and still be women? Probably fellers who were scared of competition, far as she could reckon.
A body needs hope, sometimes, more than it needs the truth.”
she was starting to figure she’d rather be any sort of mixed breed than a pedigreed man full of hatred.
“Your heart is not a rock that stands unchanging. It’s like water. It flows, it moves, it allows neither boulders nor canyons to stand in its way. It hardens and softens and expands to fill new spaces. You are still becoming yourself.
It’s always useful, knowing a new way to kill stuff that won’t shut up.”
“Because you were raised by ignorant people. They taught you to use things before you understood them. To kill things before you recognized them. To hate things before you knew them. But you’ll appreciate a thing better when you know where it comes from, when your hands know the shape of it.”
He told me to go back east, toward civilization. Toward the security of white men and their walls and doctors. So like a man, to think there’s safety among yet more men.”
All these feelings—she didn’t want a damn one of them. It was all too complicated. Being a person was mighty twisty, and yet she didn’t want to go back to being nothing.
I might like wearing a dress, but I don’t wear it for them. It’s for me. Because I like the feel of it. And I’ll not have them taking anything from me that I’m not willing to give.”
The world was not a place of black and white, night and day. It was shades of gray and shadows, dusk and dawn, in-between moments and shifting sands. And somehow, knowing that nothing was permanent or real made it easier for Nettie to slip into her own skin. For the first time, she stopped trying to be something else and accepted that what she was was as real and fine as what anybody else was.
Eye for an eye, the preacher feller always said. Or maybe that was the sheriff. The past had a way of running together.
“There’s a reason animals live in groups and people live in tribes and cities. When we get off alone, we start to go a bit crazy. People need to be touched and talked to, they need to know somebody else in the world cares. You take that away, and you have a monster.
