Through the Groves Quotes

“IF THE history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph, it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de León, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping white settlers, the US Army, Osceola, the great Seminole warrior, malaria, cattle, citrus, and a dull heat that left it undesirable for much besides oranges until the early 1960s, when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness, looked down, and said, “There.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over, and reimagined in a cycle that never quits.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Around 9 the UFO sightings started to come in. I took down all the stories, filling notebook after notebook.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“From 4 to 11 p.m., I had a kook on hold on every line. Tipsters who had the inside dope on a stolen three-wheeler in their trailer court.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“green duplex in the side yard of an elderly woman’s home, smothered by pygmy palms and a fuchsia jungle of flowering vines. The landlady was eighty-two and stalked through the yard with a machete in her hand scanning for bougainvillea to hack back.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“I put my ear to the plaster, trying to listen from my bed. I couldn’t make out the words she said, but the tone of her voice sounded like the mermaids at Webb’s City, underwater and ethereal.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“spongy green carpet of St. Augustine grass, bouncy as a moonwalk”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“The roadside vendors had taken up their positions, tent poles dug in and World War II parachutes strung over them.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Frances had thick black hair and round violet-blue eyes, and even as a child, her charisma was fierce.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Her kitchen was a work of art. She’d painted it herself, red and white, an homage to the strawberry.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“They stood in the grass, trying to adjust to the sweetness of the air. They pulled it in by the lungful. It was like a pot of marmalade burning on the stove.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Gladys specialized in family portraits, but her passion was photographing car wrecks. She had a police scanner and she often beat the Tampa Tribune or the Lakeland Ledger photographer to the scene.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Whenever she went to the kitchen to refill her tea, she came back with the white crystal tornado of sugar swirling in the glass.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“He tore into the foil on his new pack of Dentyne and offered us both a stick. As the cinnamon fire burned in our mouths,”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“She tied a scarf in her hair and set the needle down on Fiddler on the Roof.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“THE HEAT that first day was wicked.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“The aluminum windows in our house were defenseless against the cold, but our warmth was beside the point. It was the oranges that had to be kept warm.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“A Brach’s peppermint was clicking around on one of her back molars.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“emptied multiple bowls of sugar into their pitchers of iced tea.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“When Gigi finally pulled into our driveway in her bat-winged car, she looked like an arriving medic with her small white suitcase.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“he lined them up in the front yard and took aim like an executioner, all of them—Gigi, my dad, and my aunt Anne. He terrorized them until the sheriff’s deputy rolled up. Then it turned to humiliation, Gigi standing in the damp grass of her front yard in a nightgown with her children as the deputy told my father’s father to go on inside and sleep it off.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“My father’s father was the rapscallion of his family, sent to a military academy in Georgia after slugging his high school principal.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“her smile was vacant, as if she were time traveling.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“I was this close to being a midnight snack for a ten-foot alligator.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Jesus Chrysler, John, it’s 1967 and there are easier ways to make a living,” he told Dad.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“I was named after my father’s sister, my aunt Anne, a nervous auburn beauty who liked to look at sewing patterns and smoke.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“We stayed until the mosquitoes drove us home.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“His real parents had sent him to Florida like a package and never picked him up.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“do all kinds of normal stuff except hold a pencil in school. He was in the process of training himself to be left-handed.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Scotty lived down the street in a white stucco house that sparkled in the sunshine. He rode a green ten-speed and was missing part of his right hand from a Fourth of July mishap with an M80.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir