Sandra Dallas Quotes

You know what a storyteller is, don't you? It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't.

After all, a woman didn't leave much behind in the world to show she'd been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father's name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on.

When it's raining pudding, hold up your bowl.

Hennie replies to, How are you doing? 'I'm deteriorating at a normal rate.

Don't mind her. She keeps her nose so high in the air, she's liable to drown in a good rainstorm.

Jam on a winter took away the blue devils. It was like tasting summer.

There's a special kind of man who plants a tree when he knows he'll move on before it's big enough for him to sit in it's shade.

for pleasing to me are meadows and a far view

Marriage has taught me that women are the only ones who apologize.

She wasn't soft, but she never saw the sense of a living thing dying such a cruel death just for some woman's vanity. Still, she thought, a fur coat when the wind blew down off the Tenmile Range would feel mighty good. Maybe they made fur coats out of foxes that died of old age.

Will had loved the snow, the cleanness of it, the quiet, the sense of peace it brought, had loved it even though winter meant hard chores.

Nobody starts out a perfect quilter.

You may hate being pregnant, but the minute the baby is born, she is God's precious child, given to you as a gift.

Love is not limited.

Stories were a living thing. They changed to suit the teller or the times.

She wasn't any bigger than a minute and had hair like wild gold, and she was always merry as a marriage bell.

She remembered how Billy always picked the first apple blossoms and put them into a tin cup for her. They made the house smell like springtime. Billy said apple trees were a double blessing, first for the blossoms and then the apples.

A quilt circle's like a crazy quilt. You got all kinds in it. Some members are the big pieces of velvet or brocade, show-offish, while others are bitty scraps of used goods, hoping you don't notice them. But without each and every one, the quilt would fall apart. There's big and small, old and new, fancy and plain in a quilt circle. Some you like better than the others. We have our differences, and Monalisa is a trial, but it's a surprise how we all come together over the quilt frame, even Monalisa. We're as thick as a lettuce bed.

... I told him I was so happy that I had nothing else to pray for. 'Why,'says I, I've got prayers to sell.

Dawn was her favorite time of day. God birthed the world then, she thought.

Both of them loved the earth and the things that grew in it.

Quilts are like lives. They’re made up of a lot of little pieces,” Nit said.

Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past.

Will was dead, but Missouri Ann was going to have a baby. Birth and death were God's way, she told herself. Joy and sorrow were joined together.

Missouri Ann ate her bit of orange slowly. "Tastes like summer," she said.

we women always feel guilt, even about things that can’t be helped.

to sheer numbers, the North would have won again. Moses then proposed “Turkey in the Straw.

Sometimes it seemed as if the burden of each death was added to the others until she was bowed under the weight of dead souls.

They were earthy people, devoid of refinement.

Ned was always an admirer of sunrises. From his first days in the West when he was a runaway boy, he had been gladdened by the dawn over the prairie. He loved the beauty as the day began to break, the black sky softening into gray, the faint streak of yellow light, then flash following flash of violent color - rose and purple and magenta - as far as the eye could reach. He never failed to hold his breath as the sun slid over the horizon like a giant gold watch. If he rode late at night, he waited until sunrise to bed down. And when he stayed at The Chili Queen, he sometimes rose at dawn just to watch the day begin, going back to bed only when the color in the sky faded into blue, the pale shade of a shirt that had been washed again and again. Once, when the sunrise filled the heavens with streaks of pink and orange, Ned awakened Addie to see the wonder of it, but she muttered she had never seen a sunrise that was worth missing two minutes of sleep. She'd take a sunset any day. Not Ned. Sunset was the beginning of darkness; sunrise meant a whole new, glad day ahead, filled with the gift of surprise. From the first time Ned had seen the western sunrise, with the daylight washing over the prairie, turning the brown grasses to gold, he had felt his boy's heart lift and was filled with a sense of freedom he'd never even dreamed about at his father's farm on the Mississippi.

Emma fussed with the cinnamon-rose starts she had planted all over the backyard. She was as tender with the roses as if they were her children, and every hour or two she watered them.

Still, who knew how the old mountain took retribution for having its insides clawed out.

Proverbs 31:27: “She looketh well to the way of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness.

I don’t know how a woman can have such a poor view of herself as to show off poor stitching.

Now I am shut up with his mother on Bramble farm and she is no better for conversation than prune whip

The birth of a baby was proof enough. Every baby, she believed, was a miracle of God.

The feeling was not pride. It was a kind of radiance, like the burst of a sunrise, that warmed her soul.

boys grow up and cleave to their wives. A girl is a daughter forevermore, no matter where she goes or how many young’uns she has.

I must learn to be obedient. How fortunate I am to have a husband who helps me.

wrinkled silk dress and high-heeled shoes making her way past the apartment.

What Tomi liked best was school, which had opened late in the fall of 1942.