Call Your Daughter Home Quotes

“Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“It’s easier to kill a man than a gator, but it takes the same kind of wait. You got to watch for the weakness, and take your shot to the back of the head.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“If we don’t celebrate the small movements forward, we forget they existed at all.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“No. None of us get what we deserve. We make the best of what we got.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“It’s a powerful thing to need a friend when you can’t have her. There’s things that can only be shared among women, things menfolk want to fix but can’t, things too late for fixing.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Men can’t bear what women must. They jump to cry insanity as cause for a woman’s unhappiness; the utterance of the unutterable must be dementia.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Experience in life can only be judged by the obstacles one has to overcome to get it.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“If you reach a point in life where it feels there is only dark around you, that’s ’cause there is. You got to find the light. A hole can be a haven, but you can’t stay in a hole forever. What’s dark must come to light. Every person needs the sun.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Misery, like illness, is insidious, and my daughters have the virus. Some people need to blame others for their unhappiness. Parents are always easy targets.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Polite make-believe is weary business, and there is no one better at this than Southerners.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“When a woman marries and takes her husband’s name she is forever bound by his action and not her own.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Your mama knew you ’fore you knew yourself. Mothers don’t leave. She’ll be back.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“There is a time and place for memories, and old age is where they often come to reside. I used to gather them one after another, thinking, I won’t forget, I won’t forget. But it is the details that leave first and in their wake is only the one big moment. Maybe it’s a year or five years, maybe a day, some terrible day, but beyond that all the details fade. What’s left is a wave so big it smothers. Children are such a”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“My grandmother kept a place for runaway slaves under her cabin floor. It was dug out just big enough for three people to hide. When I was a little girl she showed me. Mama didn’t like that. Wanted me only to have memories of freedom. Said I was too young to be told such terrible things. “How she going to know how bad things can be in life if she don’t got nothing to compare it to?” Grandmother asked.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“What was, was, and what is, is.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“It don’t matter what she wants at this point. Other folks got a right to say what they need before she’s done on this earth.” “Maybe she don’t want to hear what they got to say.” “Don’t matter. Nobody come.” “Maybe nobody’s got anything to say,” Gertrude says. “Oh, they got plenty to say. Only everybody’s too damn scared to say it.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Even with her dying breath I told her she was going to be fine. I didn’t have the courage to tell her the truth. As mothers, don’t we owe our children the truth? I ought to have had more strength, but I didn’t. My girl looked at me with such fright. Maybe I could have calmed her with the idea of heaven, but I couldn’t let go.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Keep your mouth shut, Retta,” Mama said when I told her what I suspected. “You don’t know nothin’ for a fact.” I listened to her, but Lord, Lord it plagued me. Now I wonder if trouble won’t find you again and again if you don’t speak the truth. I wonder if you got to call what you see by its proper name, to cast out the sin within. I leave the knives on the floor of the slaughterhouse and gather up the children’s underthings. Holding them I feel what was dead come to life. I lay them inside the box, close the heavy lid and fasten the lock, but Miss Annie’s wishes don’t matter any more than mine do. The truth is in the open.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Mama would help me if she was alive. She would have been a light for my girls. She would’ve loved them the way she did me. They could have had something beautiful to remember like I do.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Everybody gets fed when Preacher’s around. He feeds our souls and we feed his belly.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Papa always said, “If we don’t celebrate the small movements forward, we forget they existed at all.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“The swamp is a beastly place. It’s ripe with things nobody wants to know.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Worry is something I’ve never understood. What good does it do, except drain possibility from the day?”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“What’s left is a wave so big it smothers. Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“This is the boy who refused to turn five on his birthday for fear of school.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“sitting”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Everything has the pull of gravity,” he said. “The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. That’s why the sun is so strong and why it pulls all the planets around in its orbit. And the earth has a gravitational pull that causes the moon to orbit around it, and the moon’s gravitational pull is so strong it moves the tides.” I asked him what that had to do with what he was thinking about, and he said, “It makes me wonder about people and if we pull things around and into us, into our orbit.” “Like a magnet?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “like a magnet.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“There was a time I didn’t have to work so hard to maintain them; youth has its own simple value that we never fully appreciate until it’s gone. I”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home