Hannah

“Peter looked up and gazed at a stained-glass window behind the altar depicting Christ on the Cross with a caption: 'God is Love.' Another major tenet of Peterism.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“Peter gave Casey a stern but loving look. “Son, you know that Golden Rule?'
Casey did, but it was Carrie who articulated it.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” she said, slowly and softly, but with confidence. The Golden Rule was the cornerstone of Peterism, something he wanted them to think more about.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“She had not only lost her virginity, she had learned that she could enjoy sex with a man, this man. Maybe, she thought, the most satisfying sexual pleasure would always come in the company of love. For on this day of her life, in the fall of 1918, she was definitely in love—deeply, passionately in love—with a young American soldier from a faraway place called Mississippi. She should have known it the day he left the hospital, a day she went home to a strange and wretched emptiness.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return

“In this small county, Thelma knew the history of Emma and her family. What was saddest to Thelma, after Emma had left, was the feeling that Emma’s marriage to any man was probably doomed to failure when she was but a little girl; doomed to failure in 1904, when her father ran off to Texas with another woman, abandoned her, her mother, her three siblings. This marriage was doomed to failure when Emma’s father taught her the basic nature of men; that they were congenitally, irrevocably, and unpredictably sorry; that she could never really trust any man, even with his own money.”
― Alfred Nicols, Lost Love's Return