"Mrs. Holmes was nice enough, I supposed. But not too nice, which was how you had to act if anyone was going to listen to you."
. . . .
"And I saw that Sissy was good, that she had learned to move through this world and love people, and let them love her back; that she did not love too intensely, as I did, or not at all, as I imagined Leona did."
. . . .
"All the Ladies Home Journals mothers sent us were not full of articles about little jobs women could take in to support the household: laundry, sewing. I'd almost laughed. As if Leona's mother could save the family fortune. As if Aunt Carrie could have doubled the size of her garden and paid back the bank. That wives could earn even a fraction of what their husbands had lost was a fantasy."
. . . .
"Mrs. Holmes tucked Decca's errant hair back into place as Decca spoke. That was what mothers did: they never simply listened. They straightened, and fixed: they ordered their children's world's while they listened. And if they were good at it, like Mrs. Holmes was, my mother had been, their children never noticed. Decca sat down for dinner, her hair neatened, none the wiser."
. . . .
"You'll know what it's like, Thea, you'll know how much joy there is." Her hot breath smelled faintly of chocolate. What an odd way to phrase it, the joy of floating somewhere, an infinite quantity of it, as if you only had to stand in the right place to catch it.
. . .
"You don't think, when you are young, that you will simply fall into your life. But that," he said, and raised his head and looked at me," is exactly what happens."
. . . .
"It was so amazing, this life: it took a person I knew completely and utterly and made him into a stranger."
- The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Anton Disclanfani
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