Valentine Quotes

“But of all the things Victor learned during the war -- that living to see another day is almost always a matter of stupid luck, that men who know they might die any minute can learn not to give a shit about who's the All-Star and who's the Mexican, or that heroism is most often small and accidental but it still means the world -- the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance. And Victor has no taste for it, not even as the sole witness to his niece's suffering.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Every book has at least one good thing…Love stories and bad news and evil masterminds, plots as thick as sludge, places and people she wishes she could know in real life, and words whose loveliness and music make her want to cry when she says them aloud.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“…I got my first cheerleading outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us [girls] did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or some well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer [men and boys] on. To smile and bring a little sunshine into the room. To prop them up and know them, and be nice to everybody we meet.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Glory opens her mouths, closes it. She shakes her head and looks at her cigarette. I was attacked by a man out in the oil patch.
God damn it all, Tina says, and after a long pause, I'm sorry.
I got in his truck and went with him.
Well hell, sugar, Tina says. That don't mean jack. That evil belongs to him, it's got nothing to do with you.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Men die all the time in fights or pipeline explosions or gas leaks. They fall from cooling towers or try to beat the train or get drunk and decide to clean their guns. Women are killed when they get cancer or marry badly or take rides with strange men.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“there is nothing in this world worse than working that hard, for that long, only to discover that you never had all the pieces to begin with.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Look in any ravine within fifty miles of the border, Victor could tell his niece, in any small wash or depression, look under any skinny mesquite that might bring some small relief from the hot sun, and you will find us there. You could build a house with the skeletons of our ancestors, a cathedral from our bones and skulls.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“[...]because I happen to like holding a room full of teenagers hostage while I read Miss Willa Cather's My Antonia out loud to them.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. [...] The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can't imagine any other way to tell the story.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“switch the safety off, and wonder what that might feel like, to destroy something just because you can.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Why wasn’t Baby Jesus born in West Texas? Because they couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“What kind of woman runs out on her husband and her daughter? The kind who understands that the man who shares her bed is, and will always be, just the boy who got her pregnant. The kind who can’t stand thinking that she might someday tell her own daughter: All this ought to be good enough for you. The kind who believes she is coming back, just as soon as she finds someplace where she can settle down.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Here is a person who is, and must always be, what the whole world was made for, and without whom that same world becomes unimaginable.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“He wears a Stetson so clean you could eat a sandwich off the brim. All hat, no cattle. Keith leaned forward and looked me right in the eye,. Family's been in Texas since forever. Probably got a whole cedar chest full of white hoods in the attic.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“The only thing I hate more that being home with Alice all day long is feeling guilty about not wanting to do it. Corrine's voice breaks and she pushes her fist against her mouth. She is trying not to cry, and this makes her even angrier.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Yeah. What do you need, Corrine, to be happy with me and Alice?

She doesn't hesitate. I need to go back to my work, Potter.

Honey, you work, taking care of Alice and me.

Yes, I do. I'd prefer to teach English to a classroom full of hormonal rednecks.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“When I think back on that day, and finding Gloria Ramirez on my front porch, my memories are stitched together like pieces of a scrap quilt, each a different shape and color, all bound together by a thin, black ribbon and I expect it will always be this way”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Sunday morning, February 15—It will be cold comfort, knowing she is not alone. Plenty of other women have gone before her. By the time she pulls into the fire lane at Sam Houston Elementary, two suitcases and a shoebox of family pictures hidden in the trunk, Ginny Pierce knows plenty of stories about those other women, the ones who ran off. But Ginny is not the running-off kind. She will be back in a year, two at the most. As soon as she has a job, an apartment, a little money in the bank—she is coming back for her daughter”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Or maybe she just didn’t fucking feel like smiling.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“And there will still be a woman somewhere who refuses to give up.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Shit, I got my first cheerleader outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer them on. To smile and bring a little sunshine into the room. To prop them up and know them, and be nice to everybody we meet.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“And each time they will grit their teeth and wait to love each other again, and when they do, it will be a wonder.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Every book has at least one good thing”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Talking shit, Corrine mused, same as any other group of men anywhere else on the planet. She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker. After a few minutes, it was all just low, male murmuring.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Woman, he said, are you apologizing to me? Well. I guess I really am dying.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Freckled and nearly hairless, it is a face that will never need a daily shave, no matter how old he gets, but she is hoping he dies young.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“When they were standing in Corrine’s driveway and Mary Rose spat out that word—bastard—her voice was flat as the land Corrine is looking at now, and her heart fell to her feet. She has heard this tone of voice a few times in her life, usually but not always from a man or group of men. And although Mary Rose is angry and afraid, and there’s a little girl driving around with a man they don’t know, it occurs to Corrine why Mary Rose’s tone of voice sounds so familiar. It is not the ginned-up, high-pitched rage you hear when a crowd burns a book or throws a rock through a window or plants a kerosene-soaked cross in somebody’s yard and sets it ablaze. The flatness of Mary Rose’s speech, the hollow affect, the cold and steady tone of voice—all are fear and rage transformed into wrath. Hers is the voice of someone whose mind is made up. All that’s left to do is wait for the little spark that will justify what is about to happen next.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine