Quilly Quotes

Our appetite for destruction grew with feeding. I started gingerly, pulling some books out of a case, but soon was tearing out pages by the handfuls and throwing them around. Jerry got a knife and ripped the stuffing out of the mattresses. He threw feathers from the sofa cushions. McQuilly, driven by some dark Scottish urge, found a crowbar and reduced wooden things to splinters. And Bill was like a fury, smashing, overturning, and tearing. But I noticed he kept back some things and put them in a neat heap on the dining-room table, which he forbade us to break. They were photographs. The old people must have had a large family, and there were pictures of young people and wedding groups and what were clearly grandchildren everywhere. When at last we had done as much damage as we could, the pile on the table was a large one. "Now for the finishing touch," said Bill. "And this is going to be all mine." He jumped up on the table, stripped down his trousers, and squatted over the photographs. Clearly he meant to defecate on them, but such things cannot always be commanded, and so for several minutes we stood and stared at him as he grunted and swore and strained and at last managed what he wanted, right on the family photographs.

I think sometimes God tests our faith, but I don’t think he curses us ‘cause we are his own children and children are not perfect. We love our children even when they are not perfect and so He loves us. Now that’s just my way of thinkin’.

—two books besides the Koran. I’d noticed when heading beachward—copies are given away in the lobby for gratis. I want to hoard heaps of these, cairns and dolmens of these—I want to die in this facility wrapped in a rabbinic beard as quilly soft as this duvet so that when Security (dial 0) slams down the door I’ll be buried under this monument: 1,001 Korans.

No race is free from preconceived notions about people that are different from their own kind. Some were as judgmental as her father had been, keeping their distance. She knew they talked about her, but life had left a callus on her soul when it came to other peoples’ opinions about Quilly. That child was the love of her life.

To cook was to make up everthin’ good in life and then share it with those folks you love.

Later in my life, my husband would use it to make me feel proud; he would call me his Yellow Rose of Texas and there was a real song by that name, I want you to know. I later heard that the yellow rose in that song was in fact a mulatto woman like me, a high yellow,

Nobody really wants to look the devil in the eye, better just to ride the wild pony!

I may be his lady, but I’m not gone be his savior.