Kelly Mustian > Quotes

“But it always happens you get what you need, a little at a time. You get through a hour, then a day, then a week. Then you look back and it’s been a year, and then more years, and good things found a way in, too. And in time, you see that them you lost are holding you up and moving you on. Helping you see the good. You ain’t done with good things to come.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Because Mississippi has always been steeped in its past, a native writer does not have to dig very deep to find herself immersed in an earlier time. It’s right there, just under the surface, like all those old arrowheads buried under a thin layer of soil.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“And that’s the thing with politics. It doesn’t have to be true, what people say when you’re running for office. Rumors and lies will take a person down just as quick as truth.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Most of her memories of Sylvie were blurred and faded, like chalk drawings on a slate carried too long under a child’s arm.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“But for every kindness, there was a coldness. As if the one required the other.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“She understood firsthand how comforting dreams of revenge could be, as long as they never came true.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Teensy held that life was short and she was not about to miss any good thing right in front of her, looking ahead for something that might never be.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Sick of keeping secrets for evil men.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“You get through a hour, then a day, then a week. Then you look back and it’s been a year, and then more years, and good things found a way in, too.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“She stood there for a minute or two, breathing old air from her old life that did not seem to fill her lungs anymore.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“It’s important that the young hold hope for this world. Otherwise, we’re every one of us lost.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“You get through a hour, then a day, then a week. Then you look back and it’s been a year, and then more years, and good things found a way in, too. And in time, you see that them you lost are holding you up and moving you on. Helping you see the good. You ain’t done with good things to come.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“She had heard it said that children who lose their mothers early are childlike for the rest of their lives.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Her father had so mixed up respect and fear that he could not discern one from the other, and it fed some desperate thing in him when people or animals felt helpless in his presence.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“By the time she was nine, she had stripped herself of emotion the way another sort of child might have stripped bark off a birch tree.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“in life was a true connection to one person. And Ada was setting her hopes on Matilda’s being that person.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“what happened”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Becca had been well versed in dealing with the snobbery of small-minded people, in discerning the phony from the sincere, but this woman had an inscrutable veneer of composure. She was difficult to read.”
― Kelly Mustian, The River Knows Your Name: A Novel

“It was a calculated decision in what she was coming to see as a game she could not hope to win, did not care to play, but for all of their sakes, must not lose.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“A time to every purpose under heaven” was what Pastor Brown had told Byron with regard to misleading the community about Matilda’s supposed death.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“Her mother had not been the sort to confide in anyone, but it had not escaped Ada’s notice, even as a young child, that her mother was well schooled in living with things. With enduring. And until the day Ada met Jesse, she had followed her mother’s lead.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“you get what you need, a little at a time. You get through a hour, then a day, then a week. Then you look back and it’s been a year, and then more years, and good things found a way in, too. And in time, you see that them you lost are holding you up and moving you on. Helping you see the”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“She had long believed, though she realized it only at that moment, that all one needed to get along in life was a true connection to one person.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“You don't give up on a dream all at once. First you pare it down some. Could be you dreamed a little too big, you think. Reached a little too far. You're older now, a grown-up, so you whittle a little more off that dream. Work it in around everything else. Give it some time here, some hope there, whatever you can spare. Then life throws you some curves, and you tell yourself it's just going to take a little longer, is all. A few more years, maybe. Time goes on, and the day comes when you realize that most of those big things you thought were going to happen in your life, all the places you were going to see and the things you were going to do, aren't going to happen at all...You've waited too long, squandered too much time...That rusty old dream has eluded you, and you're left with a life made mundane by the one thing that did not happen. That's how it was with me and singing...”
― Kelly Mustian, The River Knows Your Name

“But it always happens you get what you need”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“It's important that the young hold hope for this world. Otherwise, we're every one of us lost.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“worries a finger-sized hole in the pocket”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. —Frederick Douglass”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

“some of what had been lost to her, those memories that adults hold of their earliest years only because of the stories told and retold to them so often that the stories become memories ingrained.”
― Kelly Mustian, The River Knows Your Name: A Novel

“Matilda cried about everything her mother would never do and all that she had been made to do, all that she had never had and all that had been loaded upon her narrow shoulders, every mean word and hard look and unkindness that her mother had borne without ever once returning evil for evil.”
― Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House