Pigs In Heaven Quotes
"Even on the nights when he turns over and holds her, Harland has no words for Alice—nothing to contradict all the years she lay alone."
"Alice wants to warn her that a defect runs in the family, like flat feet or diabetes: they’re all in danger of ending up alone by their own stubborn choice."
"But it’s Alice’s impression that most of them grew up with hungry hearts, feeling sure that one day they would run out of everything again."
"No matter what kind of night you’re having, morning always wins."
"This child is the miracle Taylor wouldn’t have let in the door if it had knocked."
"The hardest thing about motherhood, she thinks, is that you can never again be the baby of your family, not even for ten seconds."
"Taylor feels weak-kneed, as she did looking over the parapet wall. The hardest thing about motherhood, she thinks, is that you can never again be the baby of your family, not even for ten seconds."
"If people won’t talk to each other, they shouldn’t count on strangers in suits and makeup to give them the straight dope."
"I never make fun of Annawake. She’d beat me up."
"That’s what we’ve got people like you for, isn’t it? To watch out for the kids."
"I can’t feel it. You know they’re stealing it from me."
"She needs to know what it means? Do you? I’ll bet she sees Indians on TV and thinks: How. Bows and arrows."
"You’re his twin. Dell was half grown before you two were born."
"You and I could have been lost children. I very nearly was."
"The Native American Law conference starts on the fifteenth."
"Your definitions of ‘good’ are not in the same dictionary."
"Honor the temple, for the Lord hast housed thy soul within."
"If they’d all get together and eat the fruit off one side of the tree, I wouldn’t grudge them."
"The only difference between here and anywhere else is that here everything’s got thorns."
"We experiment. Peanut butter and green bean sandwiches. Nothing hard core."
"A baby ain’t made with disappearing ink, Cash."
"I waited my whole life away down there in the Nation."
"We’re going to be snowed under here again before you know it. I wasn’t cut out for six feet of snow."
"It’s not the heat gets me, it’s the humanity."
"They have to be made special, or you can put things together from St. Vincent de Paul’s and the Goodwill, but it’s extremely creative."
"Do you think it’s possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don’t need to rise above it?"
"I don’t need you to lie to me, Jax. We both know this is nothing."
"Thank you, Jax. I need to paint now. Why don’t you go mop some floors."
"We could rent another room if you want to pay for it. Otherwise, we have to share."
"You drop your quarters in and hope maybe this time the spin cycle will work."
"I’ll probably be up most of the night anyway. I don’t sleep that good since I went through the change of life."
"It’s gambling money, anyway. It was wrongfully come by in the first place."
"I’m working on the song about the Twilight Zone of Humanity."
"You’d just as well jump off a bridge than to start in like that."
"Well, sure, you get by. I heard about them civil rights they had down there."
"I have no idea how far off track I might really be."
"It’s a matter of putting in the effort, and being careful what you spend."
"I’m not taking her side, but she sounded like she could be real worried."
"We could go along with the idea, or he can turn himself around and 10–27."
"I took your suggestion, I’m working on the song about the Twilight Zone of Humanity."
"I got started rolling down this hill, but I don’t know why or how far."
"Well, I wonder what that could be? She got some kind of a claim?"
"I don’t know how to bring this up, but Mama and Turtle and I are not on vacation."
"Well, it’s your car. If you want to use it for transporting the criminal element."
"Alice feels the familiar deep frustration of loving someone by telephone. She wants to hug Taylor more than anything, and can’t."
"Well, anyway, good luck when you talk to her, Mama. I better hang up on you now before you buy the phone company."
"Alice, honey, you look like you just run over your dog. How’s that girl of yours?"
"Don’t worry about it. I’m just putting it on Sugar’s bill. She said we could work it out later on."
"It’s her shackles for the stomp dance," Sugar says. "The young girls wear them on their legs."
"I don’t know. Maybe Roscoe would know. That’s just the number."
"Whenever she feels like she’s done something wrong, or if she thinks Taylor’s leaving, she just… I don’t know what you’d call it."
"We’re not going to decide anything today. The best we can hope for is just to get acquainted."
"You should click your heels together and get your butt back home, Dorothy."
"I’m breaking mine, Jax. I don’t believe this is my life."
"We have to look farther back than our parents, sometimes, to find out how to behave."
"You fry hogs? Oh, yeah. Cut him up first. For a special occasion."
"If we could get it across, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now."
"That’s just a story. You’re judging yourself by the great American cultural myth, but Horatio Alger is compost, honey."
"I wish somebody’d give us some day-old bread," Taylor says to Turtle. "Don’t you?"
"He told Alice at breakfast she always knows when there’s a storm coming in, because she can’t get her shoes on."
"The fire seems to Alice like a quiet consciousness presiding."
"If you get around to deciding you're Cherokee, Alice, then that's what you are."
"For the first time she can remember, Alice feels completely included."
"The instant a dance stops, she becomes aware of her body again."
"We don’t distinguish between father, uncle, mother, grandmother."
"Our tribe. We’ve been through a holocaust as devastating as what happened to the Jews."
"I love her more than I can tell you, but just that I love her isn’t enough."
"The Six Pigs in Heaven, and the one mother who wouldn’t let go."
"It’s real hard on her to have to be separated from me. I just want to tell you that, for your records." - Taylor
"Sometimes Turtle lies in the bathtub with a blanket over her head for hours and hours, if she thinks I’m mad at her." - Taylor
"A giant who can make himself small." - About Andy Rainbelt
"The Indian Child Welfare Act was designed principally to protect the tribe from losing its members. Our children are our future." - Annawake Fourkiller
"What we have to do is satisfy the requirements of the tribe, without separating Turtle completely from the mother and grandmother she’s come to love and trust." - Annawake Fourkiller
"We’re willing to work with both families on an agreeable custody arrangement." - Annawake Fourkiller
"I’ve had enough men in my life to last me about seven lifetimes." - Annawake
"What you don’t have to accept is, that’s what your family is, the people you won’t let go of for anything." - Taylor
"He’s going to have a big say in how you’re raised." - Taylor to Turtle
"It’s all over now but the shouting." - Narrator