Shannon Celebi Quotes

Using one's beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that's how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.

Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, "Lesbians are women who like to have sex with other women," which I didn't think was all that weird.

You're worried about what-ifs. Well, what if you stopped worrying?

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.

When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, "When did you start feeling like a grownup?" His response: "Never.

Because the South can be a dangerous place, especially for those who don't understand it.

Here's a random factoid: I like cats. And here's another: I like red wine.

Mrs. Porter was from Virginia and had a smooth-as-cat-fur way of speaking. She taught me how to say, "Fiddle-Dee-Dee," just like Scarlett O'Hara and she made her split-pea soup with bacon and even let me try on her lipstick sometimes as she teased up my hair in the same sixties style she wore, "Ala Pricilla Presley," whoever that was.

It's not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, Okay, world, today I'm gonna spaz.

Mama wasn't dead ... exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

My Stephen King for his Ayn Rand. My Terry Goodkind for his T.S. Elliot. Not a bang but a whimper.

Don't worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.

Water. Like a blanket. Dark. Intoxicating. Cold.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

You're saying, "What the hell am I gonna do with her?" You're saying, "Shit, did she take her pills?" You're saying, "Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

If she could hate this much she sure as hell had loved.

Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes - not unlike you - not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don't tend to know it.

My sister and I are so close that we finish each other's sentences and often wonder who's memories belong to whom.

Sometimes, I feel my breath coming in shorter, quicker, spastic bursts, feel my heart threaten to thunder through my ribs, feel sweat beading on my brow ... and I know it's time to bust out those "chocolate frogs" from Harry Potter.

Through career fumbles and life changes, she supported me. Through shattered dreams and hopes almost-realized, she supported me too.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something ... or something.

I could say it all began with my mother.

I think of Ariel, my local neighborhood mermaid, how she only had twenty-four hours to turn her life around ...

Writing is a solitary business. It's just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

I'm sorry if ... I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you're trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

It wasn't as if she'd thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn't always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.

She dreamed of driving off bridges: into a lake beneath some twisting highway of her youth, into the reservoir on the country road to home, into the San Francisco Bay.

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.