In the Shadow of the Valley Quotes

“I forgave them when they dismissed me, showed violence, cheated. It was all I knew to do, in the absence of tenderness and carefulness and devotion and all the other words that appear inside Hallmark cards—there, they are so often nouns, like objects that you can pick up or point to.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“It’s more complicated, too, knowing that people who call themselves feminists and social-rights activists might turn their backs on the ones who need them: Women who are desperate to be loved, so they sleep with too many men. Men who are snorting pills or shooting up heroin or some mysterious opiate concoction, because being alive hurts so much, it is worth it to risk overdose and disease and losing everything you have, everyone who loves you, to escape the hell inside you, even for just a few hours. Poor people without the wherewithal to stop smoking or stop burning their trash by the creek, who would rather die in a coal mine than get free health care.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“But I discovered that our stories do matter—they tell us who we are, give us history and context that help us define ourselves. Some stories serve as a warning, while others are an endless source of hope. And there is always more to be written.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“What is it that convinces so many women—and men as well—to endure destructive relationships for the sake of the children? My mother must have performed some painful mental calculations to measure the devil she knew against the one she did not.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“it is easy to turn a man to hate if you can convince him that the outsider is the cause of his problems.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“although my life had not been my fault, I had reached the point at which I wanted my life to be wholly mine and not a constant reaction to the trauma I had known.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“The self, of course, is the main character of each of our stories—the hero, the martyr, the one whose suffering really matters and whose goodness is remarkable, whose shortcomings are both comprehensible and forgivable.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“was further away from everything, and everyone, than I had ever been before.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“When I look back on those years, I try to make sense of how I kept going. All the things that had felt possibly safe and good were suddenly gone”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“I never did find a way to make friends with the people who picked on me. No simple fistfight could change my relationship with those who had tormented me whether I was nice or cold, whether I tried to interact with them or not. Some part of me always knew that no matter how angry or hurt I was, violence was not an option I could choose. For my brother, fighting back showed the other boys that he wasn’t weak, and so they accepted him as one of them. As a girl, there was no way for me to convince the other kids that I wasn’t weak—I had never seen a girl fight back. Everything I tried just seemed to make it worse, to make me a bigger target. It was better to hope I could disappear.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“To understand that if I didn’t fix myself, I would pass my brokenness on to them—the burden of my anxiety and fear and heartache would somehow become theirs, no matter how hard I wished and prayed otherwise.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“At that moment, I began to understand how each of us—my brother, my mother, and myself—were very much alone in that house. In my child’s mind, I felt the most alone of all.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not. I learned that when things looked wrong, felt wrong, there had to be something I didn’t understand. I learned I should trust the man telling me to trust him, to accept whatever he was doing, no matter what my own good sense had to say. I learned to ignore my own judgment, and for a good long time, I had no idea that I could trust myself.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return. I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“Pain is a place, a substance, a state of being: I am in pain. We say hurt, and we mean like that baseball that hit me in the face when I was twelve. Or we say excruciating, and we mean like giving birth and the stitches that follow. We say broken and mean my arm or my heart or something else I clearly need to be whole. Suffer enough, and if we are lucky, you and I decide something has to change, and somehow, sooner or later, it does.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“I had to unlearn the most important lesson I had learned as a child, the most important rule of survival—to be quiet.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“I hid myself deep so that on the surface, people would see quiet and good girl. I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“When I sit alone at the end of the night, I realize this is my greatest triumph—to give my children the love and comfort I longed for, but which were not to be found in my childhood home.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“I think I would tell her to see how he reacts when she doesn’t please him, when she doesn’t follow his unspoken rules. When she is too loud or accidentally breaks his favorite cup. When she wears something he doesn’t like or gets excited about something he doesn’t care about. Does he talk out both sides of his mouth? I’d ask. She’d know what I mean—does he find a way to make himself right when he’s wrong? Does he charm people with his endless wit and wisdom, and where does he want her to sit while he does it? And then there’s the other women, so good at deciding when a woman’s sexuality is her empowerment or her sluttiness. So wrapped up in keeping women in their place—whatever that place may look like—they forget that the rules they embrace are also their own bondage.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“But just like the coal bosses brought in scabs to break the strikes, it is always someone at a higher pay grade who convinces workers to blame immigrants, people of color, and other poor people when the owner won’t pay fair wages. In a land like this, people have actually been fighting for their lives—not figuratively or metaphorically”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“the birthday dinner, as I tuck him into bed for the night, he hugs me tightly and tells me, We love each other so much. I’ll always fix your heart, even when your dad breaks it.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“around telling people how much faith she had, or how good God was to her. I heard it in her quiet prayers. I tasted it in the food she grew, canned, killed, and cooked. I felt it in the softness of her skin, which grew loose and spotted with age, unprotected and unadorned. It filled her house and spilled into the creeks and waiting hillsides, it wrapped itself around me, and I held on to that when there was nothing else.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“Some stories serve as a warning, while others are an endless source of hope.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

“Despair takes on a different look, depending on where you go, but those who have lived it can see it in others.”
― Bobi Conn, In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir