Frances O'Roark Dowell Quotes

Tobin, my man, you are going to learn about chickens. And when you to learn about chickens, you will learn about life.

When I think about everything that's happened since school started, well, I don't think the word 'normal' applies to any of it. Verbena is right - I'm way past normal. Only I've realized that when you move beyond normal, the road you're on doesn't necessarily take you to the land of the abnormal or the weird or the freakish. Instead you might find yourself in a place where people build Freedom School and have the courage to live large. It's a place where people don't worry too much when they get a little goat poop on their shoes.

I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.'
'Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy.

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way.
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My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress.

Everybody's broken, sweetie. God helps us get put back together.
~Rev. Mayes
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be

4. If you do not give your chickens enough space, light, air, and walking-around room, they will eat one another.

That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you.

Dream girl? Ain't such a thing. You walk, you talk, you got mammary glands, well, that's gonna do it right there for most guys.

You gonna stand in my backyard and ignore me to my face?

Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old.

A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark.

I have to say, it felt good to be wanted, son. Felt real good.

Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."
Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"
Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way.