Robin Talley Quotes

My life was bigger than any one person.

If I wanted to have an interesting life - which I did - then there was no point sitting around debating everything in my head on a constant loop. If I wanted my life to change, then Had to do something. Or at least try.

Frankly, it's self-evident. As people of faith, it's our duty to love everyone, the way God loves everyone. There's no reason why any one group is less deserving of love - either the love of a church community, to the love of a family - than any other.

Lily had lived with the same pain for so long it felt like a part of her. The worst days, though, were when the pain was different. When it came faster, or harsher, or fiercer than she was used to. When it prickled instead of throbbed. When it attacked her right ankle instead of her left knee. When it woke her up at night instead of aching dully first thing in the morning. On those days, her standard-issue pain was replaced by something different and frightening, something that took over her body and left her without the slightest clue of when, or even if, it would release her.

Those times, her pain wasn't a part of her anymore. Those times, she was a part of it.

Sarah's right. We punish ourselves so much in our own imaginations. We convince ourselves everything we do, everything we think, is wrong.

For eighteen years I've believed what other people told me about what was right and what was wrong. From now. I'm deciding.

The lipstick is a dark, dark red. The kind Hollywood stars wear. Not a shade good girls in Davisburg wear to the movies. I try it on anyway and gaze at my reflection in the mirror.

I don't look sick. I certainly don't look like that kind of girl.

What does that kind of girl look like, anyway?

What about our right to an education?" Linda's quote [in the Davisburg Gazette] reads. "No one talks about that. The colored people aren't the only ones who should have rights.

Now you listen and you listen good." [Mama's] voice is so quiet it scares me. "Nobody's going to let us be anything. We have just as much right to this world as they have, and we are not going to wait around for them to give us permission.

But maybe no one knew that much. Maybe everyone was making it up as they went along, the same as me.

That was when I forgot how to breathe altogether.

First, though, she had to go back out there and smile at everyone. Fake her way through the rest of the night and another three days. Pretend to still be normal.

When she was pretty sure she never had been.

Lie #4

I'm not lonely.

Lie #1

There's no need to be afraid.

In that moment, it felt like we were the entire world. Just me and those gorgeous stars.

Lie #3

I don't care what they think of me.

But sometimes he actually found it preferable to think the reason he didn't fit in at Acheron was that he was poor, or that he was gay, or that he was fat. It was better than thinking the problem was the fact that he was...him.

Lie #7

They won't really hurt me.

I was really good at sitting around and debating things in my head.

It could be our own private universe.

Girls like me smiled politely and always did the right thing. Girls like me definitely didn't sneak away at night to do things that would crush their fathers. And if they did, girls like me knew how to keep it to themselves.

Between the atheism and the lesbian thing, Lily was a terrible Catholic. Even before she'd added murder to her list of sins.