The Chicken Sisters Quotes
"Most people don’t have the balls to actually go after what they want. They talk about it, and they think about it, but they don’t often make it happen."
"You work hard and you pay your dues and it pays off."
"You need to make hard choices, and then just keep going."
"Start young, and you end up like me—two great kids who can mostly take care of themselves, and you’re not too old to enjoy it."
"Who needs meditation when you have clean drawers?"
"It’s always easier to get a job when you’ve got a job."
"We’re not making little videos for our neighbors in Kansas. We’re a national television program, funded by advertising and sponsorship, that needs to appeal to the customers of those businesses."
"You don’t always get to decide what’s junk, Mae. You don’t get to pick and choose everything we have and everything we do and everywhere we go."
"They would have figured it out. They would have."
"I’m not that good. It’s just something I do on the side."
"I guess so. It’s funny you draw chickens, though."
"The stripper thing is probably too much, to start off with."
"If they think I can’t manage, and bring in social, they’ll take you two away. Is that what you want?"
"Everybody’s like that. But if we’re smart, we can manage the story they tell."
"It’s okay. You’re going to be great, and this is going to be a fabulous Food Wars."
"We can’t give them any excuse to go snooping around, you hear me?"
"A little after they moved up here, when they were redoing the place, Patrick asked if I could teach him to bake pies like mine, so I did."
"Mae tried to imagine Barbara and Patrick, side by side, matching rolling pins in their hands."
"Pies were Barbara’s department, and she accepted no help."
"Maybe Patrick would teach her. If nothing else, it would make a hell of an Instagram post."
"The muffins inside glowed, lit by the bright sunlight."
"Unexpectedly, Mae heard an echo of Jay in her mother’s words, with the same resignation, and it annoyed her."
"Saturday I’ll fry them doughnuts and be the greatest thing ever for about ten minutes."
"The tears that had overwhelmed her when she saw their fallen tree were threatening to become an all-day affair."
"This wasn’t anxiety, it was horror, it was a shit show, it was the impossible meeting the unbearable and crashing into the unthinkable."
"She felt better the minute she had the pencil in her hand."
"You don’t grow up in a small town as 'the kid who can draw' without ending up with requests."
"He’d taken his comics of a boy and a penguin and turned them into beloved icons."
"The relief made her bouncy, and Carleen’s determination was giving her confidence."
"Trust Mae to have already taken the easiest idea."
"You can’t pay somebody to care like you care."
"If nothing else, it was kind of fun that Barbara was so into this."
"Her son was sweet. But Amanda hoped he never brought it up again."
"Sabrina had just appeared in the doorway, phone in her hand."
"She wanted Amanda to know that she knew what Amanda had done—and that there would be payback."
"I believe it." He stood looking after them as they got into the cab. "You take care, now," he called. "Good luck tonight."
"Amanda doesn’t matter right now. Just put the box in the truck."
"You must have said something to somebody. Stuff like that gets around, Mae. You can’t just mouth off here."
"I swear I didn’t say anything to anyone, Mom. I didn’t. This was all Amanda."
"Sometimes I feel like your Mimi doesn’t even want me looking at her recipe."
"It doesn’t even matter—this is better than organic."
"You can love a town and still leave it, you know. You think you have all the time in the world. But you don’t."
"This is where I live. Why wouldn’t I be happy? Why would I want to leave?"
"We just keep frying up the same perfect chicken."
"There are obviously other reasons my mom has trouble cleaning up after the puppies, and everything else. She's working on those."
"The spaces around us reflect the spaces inside us, and when those things don't go together, that's how we know we need to make a change."
"For my mom, she's found that as she gets older, she sees what's really important in life, and now she wants her house to feel that way too."
"Helping my mom clean up—and coming back to Mimi's and my hometown—have kind of done the same for me."
"If you've seen my book at all, you know I have a saying: clean space, calm mind."
"I guess I always figured that if I had clear counters, a clear mind would just naturally follow—and it didn't."
"Just like my mom needs to get her outer world in order, I need to be working on that inner stuff."
"Coming home is helping me figure out which few things are important, and I need to start making sure my life reflects that same simplicity and clarity I love to create in the spaces around me."
"Clean spaces, calm minds—they’re a journey, not a destination."
"I’m sorry. I know, I need to explain, and I couldn’t, not with them filming everything."
"It didn’t matter where you were from, Mae. It never would have mattered."
"I’m not sure I want this either. But my mom might be really sick, and then there’s my aunt, and Mimi’s."
"What’s here, what’s in front of us—that’s what matters."
"We have to experience life to have anything worth sharing. It’s time to get real. I get it."
"I want you, Mae. And I want our family. But I’m not sure I want this."
"I also might not have mentioned that I put myself through college working at a place called the Yellow Rose of Texas Gentlemen’s Club."
"I am sorry about that," Mae said softly, "I wanted you with me, not with Frank, but you did okay."
"Your recipe, your mother’s recipe—it’s not just food. It’s family, it’s history, it’s love."