The Moonlight School Quotes

“Sometimes you have to give something up to make room for something new.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“Boy, farm with your hand on the plow, your eyes on the furrow, and your mind on the Lord.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“You old buzzard!” Shakily, Miss Viola rose to her feet. “Why, if women could vote, you’d never been elected in the first place.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“Sheriff said: "Females . . . they jest don’t have the same kind of brains that menfolk do... Have females not lived many years without knowing how to read and write? And it ain’t hurt ’em at all. Jest the opposite. Womenfolk need our help and guidance.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“Lucy, sometimes what we choose not to do is just as important as what we choose to do.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“She thought of how important education had been to Father. She appreciated it now with a different view, after seeing the world from which he had come. She understood so much more about him now, especially how he wanted to distance himself from relations, how he hadn’t brought Lucy back to where he’d been raised. She’d always assumed he wanted nothing to do with the poverty of Appalachia. Now she recognized his avoidance as a revulsion of its intellectual poverty.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“If God gave her a mouth, how could it be wrong to use it? What did he think a lady was meant to be, anyhows? Dumb and docile, meek and mouselike, that’s what it sounded like.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“But if they can’t read, how can they take part in the world? How can they vote? Or pay for goods and not get cheated?...

If a man cannot read or write or vote, he cannot speak. He is mute. He is forgotten. You might think it’s a pity they cannot read, but the real tragedy is they cannot speak.” She picked up her pen. “That, Lucy, is the real tragedy of the twentieth century.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.

She tilted her head. "What's that mean?"

It's a verse from the Bible. As much as the devil would like you to do wrong and think wrong and act wrong, if God lives in your heart, then there's no room for the devil.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“When motivation meets opportunity, miracles can happen.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“No one should get above their raising...

Beulah Klopp, as did her judge husband, believes everyone has a fixed place in this world, decided at the moment of birth. There are those who are high borns and those who are low borns.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“I have found it vital to acknowledge the glory of creation aloud, each time I encounter it. Whether it's a sunset or a dogwood in bloom.

Why?

...Lest I become immune to it.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“I used to be called the jailhouse singer. Always behind bars and missing a key.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“There's a distance between loneliness and aloneness. I've grown accustomed to aloneness and find I rather like it.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School

“Most everyone in these mountains either drinks whiskey, makes it, sells it or runs it. But the higher up you go, the more ornery the moonshiner. They're up there for a reason, They want to be left alone, and don't want anyone telling them what to do or how to do it.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School