Sister Golden Hair Quotes

“Say no! I thought. Say you want yourself all for your own self. Say that you have no specific country, say that you are important without any story from above, say that your home is with me and the other girls up in the sky.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair

“Do you ever pray to Jesus?” Sheila’s mom asked. Here we go. “No,” I said. Actually I did pray. Sometimes I prayed to the memory of the altar at our old church. Not on Sunday mornings but in the evenings, remembering the times after dinner that I’d snuck over to run around on the dark altar, with its linen cloth muddled in gold light. On the altar I’d seen a lady in her coffin, the skin of her face slack and her features completely still, and also a bride so pregnant that the zipper on the back of her dress had to be safety-pinned. I believed that the altar was a soft spot, an opening between our world and the infinite one. Now, though, God was mundane, something old and pretty, but broken, like the bronze door handle, or the odd crystal from a chandelier, things you might see in a box at a junk shop. At times I still felt the open God feeling, not so much in objects but in the space around them, like in the space around the couch or the area between the lamp and my bed: it was in that vacuum that something might happen, though it was impossible to know how to pray to nothingness and if it was crazy to do so.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“I reached my hand under the pillow, turned the dial, and the sound—static mostly—came back up. At first I was worried it was Gregg Allman. But as the static cleared I heard Elton. I loved Elton. He was like Bowie, if Bowie were less fantastic and a whole lot chubbier. You couldn’t worship Elton like you could Bowie, but what he lacked in star power he made up for in desperation. His voice soared up into my brain; he was talking about the princess perched in her electric chair and how sugar bear had saved his life.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“In my room, I stuck my transistor radio between my mattress and pillow. I’d learned I could still hear the music, which came up through the feathers, traveled mysterious as smoke into my ear canal and spread like dark glitter inside my brain.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

“Across a mangy field was a farmhouse that had wandered out of an earlier time period, gotten lost, and was now unable to find its way back. Fireflies floated over the field and above the farmhouse. Tiered up the side of the mountain were brick ranch houses, lit in two colors: incandescent gold if the families inside were having dinner, or indigo blue if they were watching television.”
― Darcey Steinke, Sister Golden Hair: A Novel