Sing, Unburied, Sing Quotes
"I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight."
"Better for them to sleep. Better for my little sister, Kayla, to sleep, because on nights when Leonie’s out working, she wake up every hour, sit straight up in the bed, and scream."
"This spring is stubborn; most days, it won’t make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub."
"Pop picks the unlucky goat, ties a rope around its head like a noose, leads it out the pen."
"And if anybody come back here trying to mess with my animals, I can hear them coming through these trees."
"Goats is mean and pigs is smarter than you think. And they vicious, too."
"All at once, he stands up and ties a rope around the goat’s ankles, lifting the body to a hook hanging from the rafters."
"It surprises me every time, how easy it comes away once you pull."
"You a man, you hear?" he said. I nodded. He squeezed again, his eyes on the forgotten shoes I wore."
"The big Joseph," I say. I want to look out the shed when I say it, over my shoulder at the cold, bright green day, but I make myself stare at Pop, at the goat with its neck being raised to die."
"Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I’ll ever understand Leonie."
"You love who you love. You do what you want."
"When I first got to Parchman, I worked in the fields, planting and weeding and harvesting crops."
"Richie ain’t had near that time. It’s hard enough for a man of fifteen, but for a boy? A boy of twelve?"
"The smell of the liver searing in the pan is heavy in the back of my throat, even through the bacon grease Pop dribbled on it first."
"You going to let the boy blow out his candles, Leonie?" Pop asks."
"There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help."
"Getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up."
"Said there’s spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals."
"This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead."
"But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything, to have balance."
"Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart."
"Love is not an expression of the pleasantness in life. It is the acknowledgment of the pain and scars of others, the unspoken pact of healing together."
"A person ain’t safe, Sunshine Woman said, and that’s why this the last you seeing of me around here, Riv."
"Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none."
"It’s a piece of you. It’s everything inside of you and outside of you."
"The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I’m already home."
"It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light."
"A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song."
"They made me, baby. And we made the kids. They going to look at Jojo and Michaela and see that."
"The history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once."
"The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same."
"There’s so much water where I’m from. It come down from the north in rivers. Pool in bayous. Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see."
"Now you understand life. Now you know. Death."
"You got to push . . . until it stops hurting."
"The water in the pit was low; we hadn’t had a good rain in weeks."