And We Stay Quotes

“Because God didn't write the Bible. Men did, probably uneducated ones.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“If God made us in his image, then maybe we have a right to play God when we can't find Him anymore.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“Pall-- Oh, yes, she could feel it/even though the bullet/had never stabbed her skin./ The bright white heat/ burned at her core/ where two lives/ beat, and if he'd aimed/ there and pulled the trigger,/red would have crested/ like a broken dam/ over her hands/ as her last word rushed/ up to her throat-- Paul-- / a sound that took no time and also lifetimes.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“It does not have to define who Emily is, was, or will be.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“Never Land
She rocks herself to sleep,
rocks herself awake, rocks
until she is one with a sky
deep as midnight.
The ground is not hers-
never was-and the only
light, the only light there is,
hums a high song
from the backside of stars.
Here in the dark, yes, here
is the cradle.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“Emily is beginning to understand something about girls: when big things have been swept with no warning right out from under their feet, they have to get a little back just to keep themselves tethered.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“Seed-- The boy I loved/had the veins of the ancient./He was eighteen, but also/a hundred and eighty,/Biblical and stubborn/as stone lodged/in the earth./ When the seed/spit its way to my womb,/I wanted to farm it,/watch over its growth,/ and I was the mother,/ my body the soil,/ and so it was my/ soil to keep./ My soil to keep./And I would tend it/ myself, root out/ the weeds, rake/ the dirt back/ and forth, smooth/ and soil over and/ over and over and over/ with my two bare hands.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“When a girl loses something, she tries to accept the loss because it’s what is expected of her. It is in her blood to lose. For example, a baby lives inside of a woman for nine months, and when it is born, it is no longer just hers. It belongs to the world. And there is the poor mother, trying to stitch up the emptiness. But the hole is too big, and the thread is too thin. That baby’s going to get away no matter what.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“what she sees in her words are contradictions and dichotomies and wild juxapositions.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay

“Anthology-- What binds together the moments/of earthly grace? What gathers up/the last white daisy in an amber field;/ a baby bird hatching from a speckled egg;/the look in a teacher's kind eyes,/a look that says, You are gifted?/Gifted as in given by God,/like the words she penned on cold/ winter mornings so that/someone way down the way,/someone far into history,/might know what it felt like to be/ what she had become: a girl/ whose life was an anthology/of sad.”
― Jenny Hubbard, And We Stay