Ellen

“I looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her - surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought - and dip my fingers in”
― Tiffany Baker, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

“Not like me, who would have given anything to shed my cumbersome skin and bones, stripping myself down to marrow, to nothing more than a gambler's heart, which beat fast and true and still believed that somewhere out there, a deck was stacked entirely in my favor.”
― Tiffany Baker, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

“A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.”
― Tiffany Baker, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice