Amy Greene > Quotes

“It's not forgetting that heals. It's remembering.”
― Amy Greene, Bloodroot

“Some creatures are just meant to be left alone. They can’t be held on to, even if we love them more than anything.”
― Amy Greene

“I'd done cleaved myself to him right yonder under the trees, kneeling over that bloodroot flower. Looking at its red root sap, I was overcome with something that felt like the Holy Ghost. I seen all the generations that would come out of me and Macon. I seen our blood mixed up together, shining there in the gloomy light.”
― Amy Greene

“Her fingers were trembling at her sides, eager to touch the horse's white-streaked nose. Wild Rose stared at Myra, hide twitching. When Myra finally reached out her hand, the horse got spooked and galloped away. Myra stared after her a long time. Like Daddy, she was smitten. But I knew she loved Wild Rose for a different reason than Daddy did. Daddy loved her because she was different than he was. Myra loved Wild Rose because they were the same.”
― Amy Greene

“But a man’s love, a father’s love, must be different than a mother’s. She’d seen his eyes before he went to the water last night. He was mourning already. She remembered the remark he made weeks ago about Gracie running off into the lake. She’d wanted to kill him when he said that. Now she wanted to kill herself. She might have done it already, if she didn’t believe Gracie was still alive. It”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“What did you think?' I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks.
'Of what?'
'My writing.'
'Oh,'Ford said. He looked at me for a long moment before rising stiffly out of his lawn chair. 'I think the whole world should read your poems.”
― Amy Greene

“I seen the ring in that tangle of riches and it seemed to dark to be ruby. Might have been garnet, I still don't know for sure. It was like them blood-colored drops of bloodroot sap Macon showed me up on the mountain, a cluster of precious stones the shade of the love that was running all through me dark and deep.”
― Amy Greene

“They said there had always been a Depression going on around here. It was hard to get much poorer than they had been. But to Ellard it seemed foolish for any but the wealthy to back a man like Herbert Hoover, giving aid to banks and railroads and corporations instead of workingmen with families. Regardless”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“Anywhere he went in the town he could hear water running. Beulah had told him Yuneetah was the white man’s corruption of an Indian word for the spirit of the river. She said the Cherokees who once lived on its shores had called it Long Man, with his head in the mountains and his feet in the lowlands.”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“I’m not going anywhere without my child. I don’t care if I have to row out of here in a boat. If Ellard tries to arrest me, I’ll shoot him. He’s a nice man, but I’m not above it. You go back and tell the bastards that sent you the same thing.”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“Washburn was an idealist. He believed progress was the answer to everything. Ellard wished he saw it like Washburn did, but in his experience the state was motivated less by altruism and more by their own selfish pursuit of power.”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“wouldn’t”
― Amy Greene, Long Man

“If I think too much about John Odom wearing that ring I get mad enough to bite nails in two.”
― Amy Greene

“Annie Clyde had seen more than one tree uprooted in all this foul weather. She had heard the rain every way that it fell, hard like drumming fingers, in sheets like a long sigh, in spates like pebbles tossed at the windows. When she crossed the road and went up the bank, she could see water glinting between the tree stumps. The river had already become a lake.”
― Amy Greene, Long Man