American Girl Quotes

“Love is not a weakness. It's the bravest act of our lives.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Before there is science, there are stories to explain the world. They make it happier somehow.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Love is not weakness. It's the bravest act of our lives.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Summers with Rene began with a cigarette in one side of her mouth and a squinting of her eyes as she thought . . . . Shortly, she would make her pronouncement and it would seem magical no matter how often the words were said. "It's a beach day," blessed the day. The rest was understood. No more needed to be said. I knew that she knew. She had the gift to read what would come from the skies as surely as my mother could see births and betrayals in the cards.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Come spring, the trees give us gifts. Green bits that helicopter down from above. When they land, Joey and I follow, retrieve them and bend the blades until they touch, releasing the glue inside so we can stick them onto our noses and call each other Pinocchio. This beats anything in my yard. Gathering buds that die and fall was fine once. But chasing helicopters and having a green nose is better.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“We're free agents. We can do what we want." Free agents. When my mother used those words she'd wave her keys. "We're like two bachelorettes," she'd say as we backed out of the drive. The road she took was always by the sea. Floods never put her off. "It'll pass" she'd say when I braced myself in the seat. If a wave hit the car, she'd drive on, floating sometimes for seconds. The wipers could clear off the sand and small stones. Seaweed was the problem. Not the one with poppers. That landed with a thud and rolled like a body off the windscreens. No, the problem was the smaller stuff, bright green and fine that wrapped itself like a feather boa around the side mirror. Usually, with one hand, she could throw it off. But sometimes, it took both her hands as if it were a scarf around Isadora Duncan's neck.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“When I think back those tides were like women with different scents and different demands. Low tide was fruity and cool. It took a while to get to her edge. Low tide held back. The onus was on you to go on over to her. High tide smelled of heat that built up. It was Chanel No. 5 to her drugstore opposite. She went after you in no uncertain terms.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“If Mrs. Child's ghost was planting, my father's was building. Half finished, nearly finished, and just started projects which waited throughout the house. In Evie's room, the closet he built swung open with a bang, impatient for a latch. The closet without a door in Rene's room just stared - day and night - like someone gone mad. The garage let in birds that left a mess where planks had been pried off for a second car to rest. Worst of all, the hole that he dug for my mother's patio filled with rainwater and grew grass as tall as in the marsh. Instead of a place to entertain in summer, it became a nature reserve which she could not close down. A holiday park for mosquitos. A rest home for caterpillars and other things that she loathed that squirmed.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“In this part of America, 'R's' are the dissidents of the alphabet. They won't be ruled. Behind closed doors, they conspire and print leaflets. They make love to many women. They smoke cigarettes in place of eating food. Then, in front of witnesses with no recourse to justice, they are pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. Some are imprisoned. Some silenced. Others go missing. A few reappear sealed up in the wall of another word if they are found at all. Thus, a thought that is valued is truly an 'idear.' Wanda comes out as Wonder or Wander and both fit her.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“My mother and I get up in the dark. We dress in the dark. We walk down the stairs from the bedroom we share out of the house in the dark. Outside, the street is quiet. Too early for cars or buses, children playing, or others walking. It's too early even for talk that is soft.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Streets were quieter then. Dogs had the run of the town and children played outdoors. The side streets were for Simon Says and Green Light and Giant Step and other games. We set up our own carnivals. We told fortunes and sold coin purses that we made. But the buses on Wisteria Drive meant no one played outside my house. Even the dogs were wary except for one who only had three legs and still chased cars.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Summers with Rene began with a cigarette in one side of her mouth and a squinting of her eyes as she thought . . . . Shortly, she would make her pronouncement and it would seem magical no matter how often the words were said. "It's a beach day," blessed the day. The rest was understood. No more needed to be said. I knew that she knew. She had the gift to read what would come from the skies as surely as my mother could see births and betrayals in the cards.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“I was lying on a chaise lounge trying to get some sun on my legs and arms when two pigeons, thinking I was a slab of concrete and glad for the shade, started mating beneath me. The sounds were getting louder. This was not how I had wanted to spend my first summer out of high school”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“[Collard] greens are special. They don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked"Liberty." They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“White caps or white horses. Take your pick. They are the same. They are nature's warning before beaches had flags. I had heard my uncle point them out. It sounded fanciful as the drawings beside poems about giants using pillows for clouds. . . . When my uncle said they were there and we wouldn't be going in his boat that day . . . I didn't understand. White horses, I thought, were my uncle's poetry. Better even than calling the swells on waves "white caps." Pilgrims and nurses wore caps. Who wanted to think of them? White horses were another matter. Brothers to unicorns. Galloping. Long haired and free. I ran into the sea.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“What would play out at my first appointment at Children’s Hospital would be a drama like none in my books. No one would come to my rescue. No brothers on horses. No brothers with knives. This was no Bluebeard. It was a machine. A carnival ride with a switch out of view. The car once started would gain speed, then slow only to speed up again. All of it out of our control. No use pretending we are the driver. We are there for the ride.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“With each new primary color coat of paint, I suspected there would be no grand finale just as there had been no goodbyes with the Bucks. There must have been a last day that Joey and I played melt the ice in a cup while riding our tricycles as fast as we could around the dining room table. A last fort set upon by Indians. A last crack of our sharpshooters. A last wham bang of a roll of caps beneath a rock. A last voyage around the world in the sailboat that Mr. Bellamy built with his sons that won races and now sits in the Bellamys’ yard.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“My face is in a pillow when she asks “What’s wrong?” If only our hearts could shut like the green blinds in our room, the ones that shut out the sun and cool it down. Where the words came from, I still don’t know. They were not in my head before they fell with a pout.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Wanda, whatever she says, rides the same long breath whether she is greeting us or asking the existential questions no one else will dare. On sentences stripped of refinement and planed as smooth as wood, she does her best to navigate the changing currents in her yard and in ours. In this, she is true to her name as we pronounce it. In this part of America, “R’s” are the dissidents of the alphabet. They won’t be ruled. Behind closed doors, they conspire and print leaflets. They make love to many women. They smoke cigarettes in place of eating food. Then, in front of witnesses with no recourse to justice, they are pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. Some are imprisoned. Some silenced. Others go missing. A few reappear sealed up in the wall of another word if they are found at all. Thus, a thought that is valued is truly an “idear.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“In New England, autumn is the beginning. The lavish start of the year. The colors are deepest purple, red, and orange. The air is crisp when not scorching. It tastes of summer and winter in turns. It's a mix of what was and what is to come. It would have seemed the perfect time to move in.

I grew up hearing about the day that bodies covered the bay just steps from our new home on Belle Isle. In a novel, a reader would call it prophetic. Thousands of starling downed a plane within minutes of takeoff. The Electra crash would be a foreshadowing of what was to come, an omen that should have warned us to turn back.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“My mother gets up and puts the needle back to the start of the record or onto a select song. Light ones, famous with tourists, aren't her favorites. She prefers those that tear like an ache in your heart. Afterwards, she exhales a deep breath and looks up as if she is waking to the clap of a hypnotist. She leaves the smoky club, the sulfurous streetlights, the even darker cars, the clouds of ouzo in glasses, plates of chicken livers crusted with oregano and salt, and the man with a mustache at the door who calls the hat check girl his 'little doll.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Upstairs, Dave Brubeck plays off reels of tape with a smell I’ve come to like.  It’s the opposite of wood. Not earth, but something else. Sharp almost as insecticides yet not as sweet. Fading quickly with time like lilacs. It’s the smell of what’s new like the cameras that my mother brings home. People comes downstairs and I follow him like a shadow. He is swinging a pail.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“My favorite story is about the plague. When I have a house someday I'll paint every room a different color and have parties, too.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“English sounds are hard. Commanding when least intended. "Come." When my mother says the word it is inviting as a honey pastry in a ruffled case.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Long periods of convalescence don't make for an endearing child . . . your best skills are as transferable as a soldier's ability to kill.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me