Anne Hull > Quotes

“IF THE history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph, it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de León, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping white settlers, the US Army, Osceola, the great Seminole warrior, malaria, cattle, citrus, and a dull heat that left it undesirable for much besides oranges until the early 1960s, when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness, looked down, and said, “There.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“The aluminum windows in our house were defenseless against the cold, but our warmth was beside the point. It was the oranges that had to be kept warm.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“An old-timey sign from the 1940s was posted near the entrance with a word of warning about the gators: A MESSAGE FROM OUR WILDLIFE. PLEASE, PLEASE. DON’T FEED ME.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Jesus Chrysler, John, it’s 1967 and there are easier ways to make a living,” he told Dad.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“News reporters poured into town to cover the story. A flock of them took over the lunch counter at Gilbert Drugs, and one day Dad and I went to look at them. Sports coats and camera bags were strewn everywhere, so nobody else had room to sit.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“I put my ear to the plaster, trying to listen from my bed. I couldn’t make out the words she said, but the tone of her voice sounded like the mermaids at Webb’s City, underwater and ethereal.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“My father’s father was the rapscallion of his family, sent to a military academy in Georgia after slugging his high school principal.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“It wasn’t so much a person that greeted us as a back draft of cigarette smoke”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“They stood in the grass, trying to adjust to the sweetness of the air. They pulled it in by the lungful. It was like a pot of marmalade burning on the stove.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Lord have mercy,” Ceola said, after she hung up the phone. Translation: “I don’t have time for this foolishness.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“her smile was vacant, as if she were time traveling.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“She tied a scarf in her hair and set the needle down on Fiddler on the Roof.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“then sat across from me reading the newspaper. Von Maxcy’s murder trial was about to start, his wife charged with the crime. Irene Maxcy’s black eyes burned a hole through the front page of the paper, which obscured Ceola’s face.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“He tore into the foil on his new pack of Dentyne and offered us both a stick. As the cinnamon fire burned in our mouths,”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Frances had thick black hair and round violet-blue eyes, and even as a child, her charisma was fierce.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“spongy green carpet of St. Augustine grass, bouncy as a moonwalk”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“mostly the park was a humid, stinking wetlands of reptiles and amphibians croaking from the muck.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Scotty lived down the street in a white stucco house that sparkled in the sunshine. He rode a green ten-speed and was missing part of his right hand from a Fourth of July mishap with an M80.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Women criminals didn’t come along every day; in that regard, Irene Maxcy was a trailblazer.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Her entire being was electrified in performance, until she noticed Ceola and me. The sight of us drained the voltage from her body.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“He liked bombastic requiems that built to a frenzy—German chanting and ominous timpani drums, anything that sounded like someone was being boiled alive at Carnegie Hall.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“A girl in Polk County misjudged the depth of the water after a drought and hit headfirst on the lake bottom. She was in an iron lung, but for a few seconds she had been airborne like me.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Ceola’s part of Sebring felt like a separate town. Time slowed and the heat was worse. Ceola and her husband, Clarence, lived in a tiny turquoise house with no telephone. It was on the corner, across from an orange grove and the town dump. Chickens roamed the streets.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“We stayed until the mosquitoes drove us home.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“She got her information from the newspaper, but the really good stuff came from friends who passed things along from their observation posts in restaurant kitchens, caddy shacks, and shoeshine stands.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“Around 9 the UFO sightings started to come in. I took down all the stories, filling notebook after notebook.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“do all kinds of normal stuff except hold a pencil in school. He was in the process of training himself to be left-handed.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“From 4 to 11 p.m., I had a kook on hold on every line. Tipsters who had the inside dope on a stolen three-wheeler in their trailer court.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“emptied multiple bowls of sugar into their pitchers of iced tea.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir

“he lined them up in the front yard and took aim like an executioner, all of them—Gigi, my dad, and my aunt Anne. He terrorized them until the sheriff’s deputy rolled up. Then it turned to humiliation, Gigi standing in the damp grass of her front yard in a nightgown with her children as the deputy told my father’s father to go on inside and sleep it off.”
― Anne Hull, Through the Groves: A Memoir