Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen Quotes

“It's a funny thing, how much time we spend planning our lives. We so convince ourselves of what we want to do, that sometimes we don't see what we're meant to do.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Dying has a funny way of making you see people, the living and the dead, a little differently. Maybe that's just part of the grieving, or maybe the dead stand there and open our eyes a bit wider.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“I didn't really think Jesus cared what I wore to Cedar Grove Baptist Church, or to see the governor for that matter, considering the fact that in every picture I ever saw of the King of Kings, He was wearing sandals and bundled up in nothing more than a big, baggy robe.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“When we were little, people said we looked just like twins for no better reason than we might have been wearing the same color shirt. You had to wonder if they were truly looking at us.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“All I'm saying is that you can run away from a town or a house, but I'm not so sure you can run away from your home.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Now I know my father was a certified man of God, but at a fairly young age, I decided that when it came to my destiny, he did not know what he was talking about.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Daddy said you can see the devil in people's eyes, but maybe the devil is nothing more than the sadness they carry around inside of them, bottled up so tight that it comes out as pure ugliness.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“And yet that's all I've ever done, doubt where I'm meant to be.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“I cared that at night, when everything was quiet and I started thinking about him, my heart would start hurting so much that I was afraid that there was nothing in this world that would ever make it stop.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Daddy said that Jesus talked in parables because people have a tendency to hear but not listen. They look but don't see. I guess I was no different than anybody else. I looked and looked for that dad-gum golden egg, and I finally saw it, just like Daddy said I would. Funny thing is, I didn't want it anymore.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Remember, guls,” preached Mrs. Gulbenk, always holding the most perfect red tomato in her hand for all of us to admire, “you can fry ’em, bake ’em, stew ’em, and congeal ’em. A good wife and mutha will always have a tomata on hand.” I can still hear those words rumbling around my head some nights when I'm lying in bed and can't sleep. And the worst part, the really tragic part of it all, is that now, all grown up, I always have a couple of tomatoes sitting on the kitchen counter. That's just how strong a hold the tomato can have over a Southern girl.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

“I never for a minute would have believed a dream could be this painful.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Remember guls," preached Mrs. Gulbenk, always holding the most perfect red tomato in her hand for all of us to admire, "you can fry 'em, bake 'em, stew 'em, and congeal 'em. A good wife and mutha will always have a tomata on hand.:”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“had spent a lifetime trying to get away from this place. Funny thing, you can run away from your family, and you can run away from dreams, but, like Daddy kept trying to tell me, there's just no running away from your destiny. I knew where I needed to be.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“you can run away from a town or a house, but I'm not so sure you can run away from your home.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“The dearly departed always have a way of checking on us, especially when they have to leave so sudden”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Leaving sure makes you rethink your friends and your enemies alike.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“Let's tell the story," he said with authority, like he had been thinking of this for a long time, "of the night Jesus was born. But let's tell it our way. In our version, Mary and Jospeh will hitchhike all the way from some place like Louisville, wander along Highway 127 and then stumble into Ringgold sometime close to midnight. Worn out and dirty from their journey, they'll look for a place for Mary to have her baby. But will somebody in our small town, which, let's face it, was probably not all that different from Bethlehem, welcome a strange couple and embrace them in their time of need?"
....
A bunch of teenagers were going to make their very own neighbors, their brethren in Christ, wonder if they would have been kind enough to give Mary a warm, safe place to birth our Savior and Redeemer, which I kind of doubted - remembering how Brother Hawkin's daughter had been hidden down in Texas for a good nine months while her good-for-nothing boyfriend strutted his butt around the county dating anybody with a skirt and drinking beers behind the high school on Saturday nights.
...
And I felt like, for the first time, I wasn't the only one who was seeing the small-minded way of thinking here that people seemed to cultivate just as mightily as their gossip and their vegetables. Even Mrs. Roberta Huckster might be forced to consider if she was Christian enough to let some strange, young couple rest their heads on one of her beds covered with those crisply starched, white cotton sheets that had a big pink H monogrammed on the edge.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“The good Lord is full of grace but sometimes a person will just whip himself senseless before taking the forgiveness that He offers up for free.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“My bedroom looked very different the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It looked lonely. I opened my eyes just as the sun started creeping through the window, and I stared at the white chest of drawers that had greeted me every morning since I could remember. Maybe it’s stupid to think that a piece of furniture had feelings, but then again, I’m the same girl who kept my tattered old baby doll dressed in a sweater and knitted cap so she wouldn’t get cold sitting on the top shelf of my closet. And this morning that chest of drawers was looking sad. All the photographs and trophies and silly knickknacks that had blanketed the top and told my life story better than any words ever could were gone, packed in brown cardboard boxes and neatly stacked in the cellar.
Even my pretty pink walls were bare. Mama picked that color after I was born, and I’ve never wanted to change it. Ruthis Morgan used to try to convince me that my walls should be painted some other color. ‘Pink’s just not your color, Catherine Grace. You know as well as I do that there’s not a speck of pink on the football field.’
There was nothing she could say that was going to change my mind of the color on my walls. If I had I would have lost another piece of my mama. And I wasn’t letting go of any piece of her, pink or not.
Daddy insisted on replacing my tired, worn curtains a while back, but I threw such a fit that he spent a good seven weeks looking for the very same fabric, little bitsy pink flowers on a white -and-pink-checkered background. He finally found a few yards in some textile mill down in South Carolina. I told him there were a few things in life that should never be allowed to change, and my curtains were one of them.
So many other things were never going to stay the same, and this morning was one of them. I’d been praying for this day for as long as I could remember, and now that it was here, all I wanted to do was crawl under my covers and pretend it was any other day. . . .
I know that this would be the last morning I would wake up in this bed as a Sunday-school-going, dishwashing, tomato-watering member of this family. I knew this would be the last morning I would wake up in the same bed where I had calculated God only knows how many algebra problems, the same bed I had hid under playing hide-and-seek with Martha Ann, and the same bed I had lain on and cried myself to sleep too many nights after Mama died. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day considering I was having such a hard time just saying good-bye to my bed.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen: A Novel

“all I knew was that I had spent my life begging the Lord to hear me out, to let me know He was out there somewhere, actually caring about what happened to Catherine Grace Cline. Turns out, I think He was talking to me all along, I just never bothered to listen to what He had to say.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

“Daddy said you can see the devil in people's eyes, but maybe the devil is nothing more than the sadness they carry around inside of them, bottled up so tight that it comes out as pure ugliness, like it does with Mrs. Dempsey.”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

“Just ’cause I like serving ice cream, Miss Cline, don't make me stupid. Or are you too smart to figure that out, too?” Eddie”
― Susan Gregg Gilmore, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen