Patsey

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“…I got my first cheerleading outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us [girls] did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or some well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer [men and boys] on. To smile and bring a little sunshine into the room. To prop them up and know them, and be nice to everybody we meet.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home.”
― Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs