Stormy Weather Quotes

“And she understood, all by herself, without reading it in a novel or hearing it on a radio program, that falling passionately in love with someone, without reservation or holding back, was good for the heart. For its valves and its arteries and that invisible shadow of the heart called the soul. Falling in love was good for the soul.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

“The producer Albert Spanner had extracted more than a hundred dollars altogether from the three women. Violet came to look over Lillian’s shoulder and read the figures again. They had all read them several times over but the phrases Woodbine pool and anticline trap and promising seismograph registration were so reassuring.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

“behind every human life is an immense chain of happenstance that includes the gravest concerns; murder and theft and betrayal, great love; lives spent in burning spiritual devotion and others in miserly denial; that despite the supposed conformity of country places there might be an oil field worker who kept a trunk of fossil fish or a man with a desperate stutter who dreamed of being a radio announcer, a dwarf with a rivet gun or an old maid on a rooftop with a telescope, spending her finest hours observing the harmonics of the planetary dance.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

“A series of selves stood behind her reflection in the beveled mirror, tokens of herself as she grew up from one year to another, from Ranger to Tarrant to Mexia, out to Monahans in the great sea of the Permian Basin, to Arp and Kilgore, to Wharton, where her father had betrayed them so terribly and where he lay in his lonely grave, and finally here, to home, which would soon not be her home anymore. And all the time her heart opening and closing, opening and closing, carrying her through whatever shifts and changes came at her, an unshakable core of self.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

“This is how people wanted to appear to the world and to later generations. It is how they wished to be remembered no matter how hard life might have become. They framed themselves in their best clothes and with their most valuable possessions and smiled. Hard times and collapsing marriages and heavy labor was nobody’s business but their own.”
― Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather