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“He can call it a police action if he likes. We all know a war when we see one. People are just as dead whether it’s a war or a police action that kills them.”
“I make it a policy never to believe more than a third of what men tell me,”
“A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against.”
Grace March looked like she could lie right to your face and smile sweet as cream while she did it. Nora admired that. It was hard to be a workingwoman with a past and not know how to spin a good lie when expedient.
Maybe Communism is perfect on paper to some economist, but it doesn’t account for the fact that humanity thrives on imperfection.”
Because if we don’t have the law, then all we have is might makes right. And then women always get hurt, instead of just often,”
“Oh, who cares about the children?” Reka cut him off, and she took pleasure doing it. The trouble with men like Harland Adams was that they hadn’t been interrupted enough whenever they started holding forth about the country, the law, the children. “Stop hiding behind the children.
“If I wanted to be a Communist in America, I’d just join a church.”
“I left so I wouldn’t be shot.” Left, fled, emigrated . . . lots of words for it, that panicked rush to leave your maddened country before the bullet, the cattle car, the camp did to you what it was already doing to your friends, and turned you into a much simpler, starker word: dead.
Still, at some point on the way to becoming an old woman, gratitude began running side by side with despondency.
Grace had a way of nudging everyone into helping each other, just by quietly pitching in until everyone else did too.
Don’t let me go, Briarwood House thinks, hunching protectively around its kitchen-full of ladies. Please don’t let me go. But they can’t hear.
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said, which was what men said when they were about to talk your ear off.
Because for every McCarthy this country threw at you, it also threw a Margaret Chase Smith. And by god, when you found one, you backed her up because she was going to find herself in a lot of tight corners.
Who’s going to remember how to do these things when all our artists have been starved or shot?
