Sally Anne

“I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, How occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed, knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die.

Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. "The fortunate fall" as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter

“And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage, this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth has taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in the aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the me who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“The rare innocence of my father never hardens into experience, into knowing what's what. He never achieves irony, the consolation prize for losing innocence and gaining experience. IT would be comic except that innocence is never comic when it is an article of faith.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter