She Got Up Off the Couch Quotes

“My hair looks like it had been purchased at a rummage sale after all the real hair was gone.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“I sensed weeping and salvation in the air, two of my least favorite things.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“You could buy individual boxes of detergent and fabric softener, even bleach, and there was nothing that made me grind my teeth with pleasure more than a real thing shrunken down small. The first time my dad showed me a toothache kit from a box of equipment from the Korean War and I saw the tiny cotton balls (the size of very small ball bearings), I nearly swooned. "Let me hold one of those," I said, almost mad at him. He gave it to me with a tiny pair of tweezers. I let it float in my palm a moment and then made him take it back. Miniaturization was a gift from God, no doubt about it, and there it was, right in a vending machine in the place we used to do our laundry.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“My favorite was Love Is...Never Having to Say You're Sorry. This was,the good Lord knew, a dream of mine. But every time I refused to apologize for something, Love seemed to just fly out the window.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“I couldn't for the life of me figure out how long a person had to live, or how good she had to be, to get her hands on some treasure.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“She had taken her vows and then they had taken her, and the forces amassed against her were greater than love, greater than obligation. They were elemental, heavy as a dead planet.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“He sang like an angel, he was faithful to God and he waited honorably
for the wife he believed God chose for him. He made two daughters who
shone like mirrors in the direct sun; he blazed his path with a scythe
and his broad shoulders, and he was who he chose to be, which is the
hardest and bravest thing a man can do. He looked at us, his parents,
his sisters, his whole crooked family, and he flexed his jaw muscles,
packed up his truck, and drove away.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“He's no John Walton.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“. . .Since we were only going to the best place on the Earth, where every single minute of every day was different and filled with promise, what the heck difference did it make what we were gonna do”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“Life was about really hot Constant Comment tea in chipped mugs, it was about Chinese checkers and doing right at all times.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“There was even evidence I loved my parents, and I sure felt something for my sister, although sometimes it was a palm itching to hit her.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“Those are her memories but she has lent them to me.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“I moved and felt like a zombie, only without the flesh-eating joy that seems to drive zombies around neighborhoods like Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“Mr. M. was in all ways the model of a band director, and by that I mean he could have led an assault on an innocent nation, enslaved its peoples, and had them marching in pinwheels, all in the course of one profoundly hot afternoon.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“wanted something so excellent and strange that when I showed it to my friends their bellies would start to ache with covetousness, the way mine ached a whole bunch of the time, almost every time I took a look at the world and saw how little of it belonged to me.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“My dad still sat in his chair and smoked, watching Westerns and drinking whiskey, and my mom still read and talked on the phone and would scratch my back if I asked her. But there was a strange resistance in her, some stubbornness that made her unreachable, and the way Dad kept his jaw set was a fence around him.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“I was born an outcast in an ancient and subtle way; I was conceived out of some grief or darkness and would be made to pay a price for it.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

“But I loved him, loved him, a little girl is helpless against her love for a brother. I climbed on him, harassed him, begged him to carry me, take me with him wherever he was going. From a distance he seemed both cold and receding, a man whose most familiar feature was his back as he walked away as fast as he could.”
― Haven Kimmel, She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana