Dolores Claiborne Quotes
"I understand my rights just fine, Andy; my mother never raised no fools."
"No high-steppin kitty like Vera Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks Donovan was going to listen to a plain old country doctor like Chip Freneau."
"An island’s not a good place to kill anybody, I can tell you that."
"I’m just an old woman with a foul temper and a fouler mouth, but that’s what happens, more often than not, when you’ve had a foul life."
"The world’s a sorry schoolroom sometimes, ain’t it?"
"Sometimes I held her longer, because even after she’d gotten quiet I could feel her tremblin like a puppy that’s been mistreated by mean kids."
"I guess when Susy and Shawna heard me yellin that day that I’d like to kill her...well, they must have thought I’d hike up my skirts and tapdance on her grave when she finally give over."
"What’s any marriage like? I guess they are all different ways, but there ain’t one of em that’s what it looks like from the outside."
"A real drunk is only interested in two things: putting paid to the jug in the hand, and hunting for the one still in the bush."
"The truth is most of the times Joe hit me, he was cold sober."
"I decided right then he wasn’t never going to hit me again, unless he wanted to pay a dear price for it."
"Sometimes life is so goddam funny you just have to laugh."
"People aren’t horses, and marriage ain’t much like pulling a wagon."
"You have to understand, baby, that if some comes out, all comes out."
"I’ll see you in State Prison for molesting a child or statutory rape, whichever charge will keep you in cold storage the longest."
"It’s scary to know you can be as hard as you need to be, and never hesitate before or look back afterward and question what you did."
"It was a thing I just knew, and I didn’t hesitate a beat."
"You’d be doing it because all that grabbing was going on under your very nose for three months or more and you were too dumb to notice."
"He told you a fairy-story and you believed it."
"It ain’t the question what’s legal or what ain’t that’s knocked me for a loop here."
"If you say you’re sorry one more time, I’ll kick your butt up so high you’ll look like a hunchback."
"Because Joe was the man of the house, that’s why."
"Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto."
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
"I thought he'd leave me alone if he had something to drink, I thought we could sit together in peace and watch the eclipse and he'd leave me alone."
"You've got to remember that, for all I knew, he was going to tell me that when they laid Joe on the table and opened his hands, a little piece of white nylon fell out; a scrap of a lady's slip."
"What if he's climbing the side of the well again? I knew he wasn't—I'd finished him for good when I hit him with that rock and he fell down the second time—but part of me was sure he was."
"The only thing I was thinking about was the hand on my ankle, the hand that was dragging me toward the hole."
"You might try a little of that medicine yourself, Dr. McAuliffe."
"The worst I'm guilty of is buying him a bottle of booze—of trying to bribe him to be nice—when I should've known better."
"Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's so funny you can't help from laughing even while it's all falling apart around you."
"That single tear was all very well, but McAuliffe's questions—plus the fact that everyone could see he was pissed like a bear at me—went a long way toward starting the talk which has run on the island ever since."
"Life went on, that's all. Nobody popped up with last-minute information, like in a movie, I didn't try to kill nobody else, and God didn't strike me dead with a lightning bolt."
"Most of what being human's about is making choices and paying the bills when they come due."
"Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don’t give a person leave to just walk away from them."
"Life ain’t an either-or proposition, you see."
"You have to make the best choice you can and then pay the price."
"When it’s all doom and dark outside and only you inside to first make a light and then tend it, you have to be a bitch."
"In the end, it’s the bitches of the world who abide."
"There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."