Shiner Quotes

“She didn't know that the worst thing about a man wasn't his malice. It was his kindness, which he used in order to get what he wanted.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Making good moonshine isn't that different from telling a good story, and no one tells a story like a woman. She knows that legends and liquor are best spun from the back of a pickup truck after nightfall, just as she knows to tell a story slowly, the way whiskey drips through a sieve.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“The truth turns sour of it idles too long in our mouths. Stories, like bottles of shine, are meant to be given away.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“It's an art, the way women punish themselves. I kept myself from my mother's grave after she died because I feared I was just as much at fault for her death as my father. Ivy had spent years blaming herself for the sins an outsider committed. And my mother never let herself trust her own heart.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“I envied him. He knew how to sit with his own sorrow, how to court it into talking back.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“These two women had taught me to fear what you'd find in a man once he became a father. I went to bed with a man, Ivy said to the empty hillside, and woke up with a boy.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“After that morning in the churchyard, Ruby and Ivy's friendship became a handprint they shared, twin life lines that began and ended as one. Old churchgoers like Hasil and Ivy's father, Noble, used to have a name for this sort of union: a covenant, the kind that King David had with Jonathan in the Book of Samuel. They spoke of it as if men had invented the mystery of friendship, as if it hadn't been the liberation that sustained mountain women ever since water split rock to form the razorbacks above the hills.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“My father remained the mountain’s favourite outlaw, my mother his sacrifice. I hated my part in the myth. I was nameless, faceless. A pause in my father’s tale of glory. Briar Bird was not a man, a father, or a husband. He was a story, and nothing else.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“And once the winter faded and the rains came and the corn grew high and strong-we would cull it and grind it, soak it and shine it. We’d let the heat of the fire refine us and the cold of the creek wash us clean. And like the hills that watch us get born and die and be born again, we would rise.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Her death had stripped me of all I had and left the birth of something new in its place - something that thrummed at my mother's core and pulsed strong inside of me. A mountain woman's heart.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Flynn's soul gazed not upward into the clouds but down deep into the roots of the West Virginia earth. For him it was a soul-splitting miracle each and every time corn and water got each other drunk.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Flynn and Briar had been taught by hunters and loggers and farmers that a young woman was an uninhabited land until a man laid claim to her. Both boys saw Ruby as territory to be conquered, each of them its rightful pioneer.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Then she ran up the hill and left Flynn with his heart and his daddy's flask, both open and half empty.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“Mountain men could get drunk anywhere - they didn't need his daddy's whiskey for that. But if they wanted a piece of the mountain, something from the ground they stood on and the water they drank, a spirit made from sweet, white West Virginia corn hulled and ground at its peak by the hands of a loving father, cured and cooked until only the stoutest part of it remained, then it was Sherrod's shine they wanted. That's why they chose it: to taste the life they lived.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“All at once Floyd felt what a game of child's play caps and gowns were. Graduation, for a boy, might have been youth's last call before he faced minimum wage at the diner, or years of combat, or the dark maze of the coal mines. Sobered by their own futures, those boys couldn't see that girls like Ruby and Ivy had grown up long before. They know how to feed other mouths before their own, to lie about leaving home after dark, to avert their eyes when men stared at them too long.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner

“There's a self-generating power born from a fitting name, the same way a clenched fist shoots blood through a vein.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Shiner