Josephine Humphreys quotes:

Bobbie Ann Mason's genius only grows stronger and wiser and funnier with every new book, and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is my absolute favorite so far. What an ear she has for the telling phrase, what an eye for the heartbreaking detail. These new stories are stunning.

People do sometimes change, of course. Habits, allegiances, dreams are all alterable, but only under extraordinary pressure - like great love, fear, grief. More often, people don't change. A girl who never missed a day of work does not suddenly decide to stay home in bed, for no good reason.

Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.

sharing is the secret of civilization.

I read Butterfly's Child in one day, totally hooked. It is a captivating novel of love, guilt, sin, justice"?and how all these things are, in time, transformed surprisingly and inevitably.

But the moods could be contagious. He didn't need one right now.

Like most good looking women, she was never sure of her beauty, and had to keep checking on it, to make sure it was still there.

You know a relationship has deteriorated past the point of salvage when one person detests another's gestures.

You must be the greatest mother in the world, but you must also, simultaneously, withdraw from your children's lives. You don't want to be the major force in their whole lives. You need to do the job adequately and as best you can, and then provide them with independence from you. You have to give them enough so that they won't need you anymore.

How I Shed My Skin is, simply put, a brilliant book. While I was reading, I kept thinking two things. One, this is totally shocking. Two, it's not at all shocking, but a familiar part of my life and memory. Grimsley's narrative is straightforward and plain-spoken while at the same time achingly moving and intimately honest, and it does more to explain the South than anything I've read in a long, long time.

You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.

When people say they are happy for you it may mean they are sad for themselves.

People Should not be protected from the world.. -It cripples them.