Jenna

“The back roads of the South are, like the South itself, a medley of disparity. The storybook sight of fat-bellied cows, like soft polka dots on lemon-lime fields, can momentarily lull the passerby into believing he is traveling through paradise.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines

“But the longer I live, the more I come to see that love is not so easy for everyone. It can get awfully complicated. It can make us do good things but it can also make us do bad things.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Story of Arthur Truluv

“You see, there is no book that can please everyone. And if there were, it would be a bad book. You can’t be everyone’s friend, because everyone is different. You’d have to be completely lacking in personality, no rough edges or sharp corners. But even then, many people wouldn’t like you, because they need rough edges and sharp corners. Do you understand? Every person needs different books. Because what one person loves with all their heart, might leave another completely cold.”
― Carsten Henn

“Families change when a parent dies, and not always how you'd expect. Sometimes they turn brittle, splintering off into dark places, like a pencil stuck too far in the sharpener. Sometimes they just get quiet. Their conversations float on the surface, never venturing into the deeper waters to reach the fears and gray questions that keep each one of them awake in the dead of night, eyes wide open in the darkness of their separate rooms lined up along the same hallway. Little things that don't matter become stand-ins for things that do. It's just easier, I suppose, to be angry over who got the gooseneck rocker when Aunt Jo died that it is to admit you're scared because you don't know why Aunt Jo had to die in the first place. She was only forty-six years old.

But you don't realize this when you're young. You just think adults don't talk about things because they're not really important, or maybe they don't think you'll understand. So you start to push the scary questions away, deep down inside yourself. It's not until you're older that it dawns on you that adults are afraid to ask the questions themselves.”
― Pamela Terry, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines