The Good Daughters Quotes
"Those times a person feels most afraid for their life? Those are the times you know you’re alive."
"The wind had a human sound to it, like the moaning of a woman."
"We might have been more different—the Dickersons and the Planks."
"More than any other family in town that was what made us who we were—history and roots."
"I wonder if that Valerie Dickerson ever feeds Dana anything besides nuts and berries."
"Our families had nothing in common and neither did we."
"The idea that Val Dickerson might serve her shortcake with no cream at all—real or fake—seemed more than she could envision."
"The only things that carry on for sure are the seasons and the crops."
"What you create is a single line that spools out over the page, like a tangle of string, only what it represents is, in its way, a rendering of the subject."
"You need to not only poke holes in the bottom for drainage, but layer the dirt you put in. A little sand on the bottom. Richer soil on top."
"The worst thing you can do to a plant on a windowsill is give it just enough moisture that the roots come to the top and bake in the sun."
"I loved manure. Years later, when I said that to Clarice—the woman who became my love, she looked at me like I was crazy."
"A lot of people don’t appreciate good manure."
"I had done that good a job of freeing myself from any kind of female identity that would have left a person like Mike to suppose this observation might have hurt my feelings."
"I lived vicariously in those days, listening to the stories of boys I was friends with."
"I was born in a girl’s body, with a boy’s desires, and because this was 1964, and nobody talked about these things, I supposed I was the only person on earth who had this problem."
"I can remember when you were just a baby."
"Whatever Val did or did not do, at least she stuck around."
"You never had the world delivered on a silver platter. One thing I wanted my kids to take from me was self-reliance."
"At least she’s not there," Val said, when footage appeared on the television screen, of villages in ruins and soldiers dropping out of planes into the jungle.
"Your mother’s going to need a man around to run things," Victor pointed out.
"If I turned out OK, it wasn’t because of you. It was in spite of you."
"At the prospect of her visit, I felt a combination of irritation and excitement. After all this time I had never gotten over the longing to please her, and disappointment every time I fell short."
"All my girls showed talent in that department," my mother said.
"You’re so beautiful," I told her. "I love your body," I said.
"To me, you are beautiful," she said, stroking my cheek.
"I’ll tell you what," Fletcher said. "You pay me that, to be my stake for the move to Florida. Take good care of my dog, and on the first of every month send me a check for a hundred dollars."
"It’s like you to be that way," he said. "You’re the kind of person who can’t do anything that isn’t true to herself, and you had to wait until you were sure you had found your one true love on earth."
"I don’t believe I ever got over the kick of grafting a branch of one fruit onto another fruit tree," he told me.
"The beautiful thing about corn, Dana," he had told me, "is how every stalk is both male and female, all in one plant."
"You know what I hope?" he said. "I’d like to believe that one of these days, you’ll open up your Ernie’s A-1 seed catalog and there’ll be a full-page spread about this great new strain of strawberry plant they’re offering, bred on a small family farm in the state of New Hampshire."
"This never should have happened," he said. The voice of a dead man, if dead men could speak. "It’s best for you to go."
"I hate cheese," she told me. "Just the smell of it. Bad memories, probably."
"Your mother does the best she can," he said. "She sees things differently from you, that’s all."
"Some things happened to your mother when she was young, too," he said. "They changed the way she looked at the world."
"The times Clarice and I spent in each other’s company on our little goat farm in southern Maine were the closest thing to heaven I had ever known."
"I might have been happy about that, knowing it meant more time for the two of us, except I saw the effect on Clarice."
"How many more times am I going to haul out my lecture on Leonardo da Vinci?"
"Can’t a person take a rest around here without getting the third degree?"
"She repeated herself. She left things in odd places—her glasses, her car keys, even her purse—and when she couldn’t find them she burst into tears."
"I never liked the act of intercourse myself, but maybe your father wasn’t doing it right."
"You were a good daughter, in the end. Not the one I was expecting. But things didn’t turn out so bad."
"It’s not necessarily the government’s say-so that matters. It’s what goes on in his own head."
"I always liked a road trip," he said, though apart from those spring vacation pilgrimages to check up on the progress of Dana Dickerson’s childhood, I doubted he’d ever taken one.
"That girl may be a Negro," he said. "But she sure makes sense."
"She was some kind of woman," he said, fingering the afghan. "Tall."
"She’s still a beautiful woman, though," he said. "That part didn’t change."
"It doesn’t matter if I get drunk now," she said. "I talk like I’m drunk anyway."
"I need to ask you," she said. "To make sure I don’t get to that point."
"Promise you’ll help when I ask you," she said.
"It’s comforting, isn’t it? Those numbers remind you how small a moment in time this one really is. What specks of dust we all are in the end."
"I wish this could have gone on a lot longer," she said.
"I’ve fallen in love with another woman. I want to be with her."
"But if I’d never met Val, growing up, I might never have known a woman could be an artist. Because she was one. And that made me believe I could become an artist myself."
"I just wanted to ask my mother why she let it happen," my mother said. "A girl’s mother is supposed to protect her."
"I wish those darned seed catalogs would get here," he said, but it was only November. He had another two months to wait before they arrived and he could get to work on next season’s orders.
"Your father needs to go into a home. Your sisters are just being practical."
"My sisters have a right to their lives," Jim said. "Frankly, I wish this place didn’t take up as much of ours as it does these days. I’d think you’d be happy for the money and freedom too. You could start painting again."
"I’ve got a new baby and an eleven-year-old to think of," I said. "I’m not about to run off and rent a studio somewhere and try being a painter. And there’s my father to take care of."
"It may actually be a good thing Dad’s out of it, so he can’t understand what’s happening."
"Your sisters can’t quite bring themselves to move our dad off the land while he’s alive, but once he dies, they’ll want to take the money and run."
"I never give up hope that one of these days you’ll wake up and you will be. You’ll look around at all the other women you know whose husbands don’t love them this way, and it’ll come to you what a good thing we’ve had all this time."
"Nothing but my love for her could have inspired this."
"Enough of life. I’ve had. Enough. Of life."
"We were going to have a baby. Then it turned out she was my sister."
"You were such a pretty baby, he said. More so, truthfully, than your sisters had been."
"It's about time you came. I kept wondering where you’d got to."
"That never changes. You’re wearing your hair the way I like it."
"They were both my girls, was the thing. Either way you sliced it, I was going to be one daughter short."
"What can a man have, better than good daughters?"