All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir Quotes
"River people don’t have any business going to the sea."
"Since we all fit, why not drive for days on end?"
"Family is a heck of a thing, fierce and frightful."
"We want to touch, to hold hands, on our own terms, which is our right and ought to be our right, but most times we don’t."
"I was raised in a cloudy pillar by day and a lighter by night."
"We were Arkansans. We understood lakes."
"All my knotted-up life I’ve longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who’s good and who’s bad."
"The marvel of our Sears and Roebuck tent was that, in the brief wake of a long, laborious assembly, it disassembled with remarkable ease."
"What we Greens lost in free seats to Ouachita football games when we left the hill, we made up for in free admission to the movies."
"There are some things all the sitting in the world in someone else’s seat can’t tell you. You’d have to sit in the same skin."
"The goods, however, belonged to those of us with a keen eye."
"Laughing was how we coped with the absurdity of living."
"She wasn’t crazy. She was caught. Chained in a cell that had become unbearable."
"To our knowledge, no one was onto us yet. I suppose, the way we saw ourselves, we weren’t the kind of people who get the police involved."
"Helplessness hollowed our chests of all things hopeful, giving panic a place to pool and roil."
"When your mom is missing, what else matters?"
"Please, God, please, God, we’re begging now. Can you hear us now? Please, Lord."
"Sometimes there aren’t enough cigarettes."
"I couldn’t have fooled any adult paying attention."
"The only thing that terrified me more than getting caught was nobody caring enough to catch me."
"We were a different kind of river people now."
"Nothing feels better than knowing, even for just a clear minute, you aren’t crazy after all."
"But just about the time I’d think Moses had lost God’s favor and breathed his last with God perturbed at him, there God is, burying him."
"We think we can break all the rules and still be the exceptions who make it."
"I wore an appropriately off-white wedding dress we’d rented for sixty dollars."
"I wish I’d made it to the kettle before she did and told her to rest on the couch and let me serve her."
"Sometimes you wake up when you don’t even want to. But maybe God keeps you waking up till one day, many days later, you grow a little gladder that you did."
"Life is harder for some people than others."
"Love means finding some measure of safety with one another in a world that couldn’t be less safe."
"Mental illness may be a lot of things, but there is at least one thing it is not. It is not someone’s fault."
"What we have had, by the grace of God, is courage to seek help again, and again, and again, and again."
"I hadn’t studied my Sunday school quarterly for nothing."
"I taught Sunday school that morning and was in the hospital by 12:35!"
"To be a stranger to God in sickness and death is an incurable blow."
"Once you’ve broken to pieces, the luxury of imagining yourself unbreakable evaporates."
"You haven’t drunk deep from the cup of unfiltered failure until you’ve failed at what you were best at."
"I don’t know what that was," I cried to God, "but I want it."
"The opportunity for people in vocational ministry to spiritually manipulate those around them is lake-wide."
"But what I know for certain—as certain as a mortal mind can be—is that my mother finally knew she was loved by Jesus."
"It’s a peculiar thing, this living long enough to take a good look back."
"God appears to be robustly committed to disproving human formulas."
"We have a nearly immutable tendency to see things either bigger or smaller than they really are."
"Truth be told, we’re poor prophets, squinting to see what’s only a few inches in front of us."
"We never once lost sight of it. We wanted to exalt Christ and please him more than anything in the world."
"There is no such thing as a crowd lightly populated by affliction."
"I’d spent untold energy trying to be obedient to what I felt God had called me to do."
"We’d give anything to conform. Couples dealing with complex mental illnesses rarely have the luxury of conforming."
"I believe in nothing more passionately than I believe in the power of repentance and the completeness of forgiveness in Christ."
"It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it, how we feel at times we have to lie to tell the truth?"
"Victims of childhood sexual abuse who tell their stories often tell the first version with a mixture of honesty and dishonesty."
"It’s our job, we feel, to protect people from the truth."
"I don’t know you. I wish I did, but I don’t. Who are you, really?"
"I’m as certain as I know to be that the man went to Jesus."
"His hands helped shove the gates of Dachau open in April of 1945."
"The man deserved to be honored by his country for his service."
"I’d have thrown my body on the table if they’d let me."
"I loved saying and praying those words."
"We’re so glad you came. You are welcome here, Beth."
"Wept for most of the service. Unhidden, unashamed."
"I closed my eyes and mouthed the words."
"When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay."
"I hadn’t drowned. Even when I let go and gave myself wholly to the undertow."
"On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand: all other ground is sinking sand."
"For he who called me was holding on to me."