Tonisha Eberst > Tonisha's Quotes

“Being mindful of Aunt Kathy’s presence, I turned to reading the Bible while sitting in the living room. It was my way ofkeeping my aunt at bay. Yet, my facade didn’t sustain me for long. I got called to the dining table anyway. Next, I was told to follow Jerry’s instructions once we left the house. Then to my surprise, Aunt Kathy made breakfast for me anyway. Immediately, I was on high alert! “Oh hell, how do I get beyond this meal!”
There I was staring at bread blackened on one side and too soggy to fall off the plate. The bacon was two inches thick and fried hard enough to be a shoe insert. The grits had settled to a pace.
My eggs were a perfect substitute for popcorn. Even though I had no appetite, I had to gobble
something down or risk being ridiculed by my aunt.
Aunt Kathy made her own homemade peach preserves. It was extremely sweet and more concentrated than Playdough. I knew if she saw me using her sauce, she’d overlook the other items I left untouched. If lucky, thefermentation was potent enough to buzz me all day long. So, I made sure she’ll see me spreading that paste all over my charcoal toast. Of course, I made the

yummy sound “yums” as I took bite after bite. Fortunately, Aunt Kathy fell hook, line, and sinker for my facade. “I seeyou love that jelly! But I’m not going to let you eat all my jam! People will pay lots of money for that good stuff!”
“Yes Ma’am,” I said. Simply amazing! Being she had food she thought I liked, there was a limit.
 
But if I hated something then I had to be force-fed.
As Aunt Kathy talked, I fumbled and moved my food around as she gave me directives for the day. “When school is over, make sure to wait on the steps for your brother.”
“Yes Ma’am,” I said once again.”
― Harold Phifer, My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift

“Make no mistake: You will be challenged at some point in time. We all are. That’s just life.”
― Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond

“This isn’t a one-and-done thing for me. So, if you think you’re going to use me to scratch an itch, then you’d better think again.”
― Lotchie Burton, Gabriel's Fire

“Kurt, could you please serve this invoice upon the Prussian Pickle, the Major General von Trotha for  the disrupting the legitimate working of F..H. Schmidt Engineering Services?”
― Michael G. Kramer, His Forefathers and Mick

“Cindy Divine and her parents paused by their boat to take in the natural beauty. Lake Barkley could have been a top-paid model for a glossy postcard company that morning. It lay between little hills all dressed up in new green, and its mirror-like water reflected a cloudless sky everywhere except along the shoreline where the hills were upside down. Clusters of blossoms, dogwood and redbud, were scattered here and there on the hillsides, and a brightening red was coloring the sky along the eastern hilltops.”
― Shafter Bailey, Cindy Divine: The Little Girl Who Frightened Kings

“Buying loyalty can be as effective as fear when one’s rival is poorer than oneself.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“He clamped his eyes shut and waited for the pang of something he could no longer name to subside; it plucked at steel threads holding him together and reverberated through his system.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“That's why Twinkle likes the place so much, Scott thought, looking around at the faded wood veneer tables, and the faded souls drinking at them. Misery was soaked through the place like the old beer soaked through its carpets.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“#metooasachild”
― Aimee Cabo Nikolov, Love is the Answer, God is the Cure: A True Story of Abuse, Betrayal and Unconditional Love

“Persecution is the major reason for a Jew to exist. If it didn’t happen we’d soon be as intellectually inferior as you lot,’ he’d say. I”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One: The iconic novel from the multimillion-copy bestselling author

“Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Siddhartha Deb, William Dalrymple, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunil G

“Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!”
― Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus