More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The world was on the other side of that bridge, the world of light bulbs and paved roads and shirts that stayed white. When the river rose, the world was lost to us and we to it.
Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that.
I suppose the beginning depends on who’s telling the story.
The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.
He was my rescuer from life in the margins,
When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can’t expect no sense from her. She’ll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain’t in her way.
The battles he’d fought were the kind nobody cheers you for winning,
Win today, you got to get up tomorrow and fight the same battles all over again. Lose and you can lose everything. Only a fool fights a war with them kind of odds, or a man who ain’t got no other choice.
Some women get like that, hard times just pares them down till all that’s left is their beauty.
I loved all my children, but I loved Ronsel the most. If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place.
Not that I didn’t adore my girls, but I wanted the fiercer, less complicated love, unsullied by judgment and comparisons to one’s own self, that my sisters had for their sons, and my brothers for their daughters.
How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.
But a man ain’t never gone thrive without a woman by his side.
The realization stunned me, though it shouldn’t have. He’d given me all the clues I needed to see the weakness at the core of him, and the darkness. I’d ignored them, preferring to believe the fiction. Jamie had created that fiction, acting the part almost to perfection, but I’d been the one who swallowed it whole. I was to blame, for having fallen in love with a figment.
THE BIBLE IS FULL of thou-shalt-nots. Thou shalt not kill, that’s one. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, that’s two. Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife—three and four. Notice how none of them have any loopholes. There are no dependent clauses you can hang your sins on, like: Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife, unless thou art wandering in the blackest hell, lost to yourself and to every memory of light and goodness, and uncovering her nakedness is the only way back to yourself. No, the Bible’s
...more
Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn’t understand that can go fuck Himself.
barn. Laura found me there half an hour later, and Florence found us both not long after that. Laura thought I was asleep by then, but I wasn’t. I saw Florence come in with the knife, saw her rage and knew what she meant to do. I wished there was some way to tell her it was already done, that he didn’t die a peaceful death. I put my guilt in my eyes, hoping she would see it. What we can’t speak, we say in silence.
That’s what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.
