Hillary Jordan Quotes & Sayings

Daddy shook Pappy's hand, then Henry's, then hugged the children. At last he turned to me. Softly, in a voice meant for my ears along, he said, When you were a year old and you came down with rubella, the doctor told us you were likely to die of it. Said he didn't expect you'd live another forty-eight hours. Your mother was frantic, but I told her that doctor didn't know what he was talking about. Our Laura's a fighter, I said, and she's going to be just fine. I never doubted it, not for one minute, then or since. You keep that in your pocket and take it out when you need it, hear? — Hillary Jordan

I never got falling-down drunk, just maintained a nice steady infusion throughout the day. A lot of it I sweated out. The rest I put to use. I was the designated charmer of the household, the one responsible for keeping everybody else's spirits up. To play my part I needed booze. I — Hillary Jordan

Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that? — Hillary Jordan

That wasn't enough. They weren't enough.
Nor, she soon realized, was Will, though by every rational measure he ought to have been ... He became ardent, spoke of love, hinted at marriage. She stilled his roving hands and deflected his near-proposals. Finally, when his frustration turned to anger, she cut him loose, bleeding and disoriented, her own heart perfectly intact.
Aidan wouldn't leave it intact, she'd known that from the first. Long before they became lovers, she could foresee that there would be an after, and that it would lay waste to them both. — Hillary Jordan

When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can't expect no sense from her. She'll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain't in her way. That's the Lord's doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain't around to do it most of the time. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can't help but look after that child. — Hillary Jordan

What we can't speak, we say in silence. — Hillary Jordan

She was inexorably in motion, on her way to a fate that would not include him, and though she missed him still, she was conscious that something had shifted inside her since she'd seen him on the vid. Through some unknown agency, the roar of his loss had diminished to a loud rumble, and the waves had spent much of their fury. The hold he'd left inside her was beginning to knit itself closed, and if she squinted, she could see that one day far in the distance, all that would remain of it would be a ragged seam, sensitive to the touch perhaps, but no longer tender. — Hillary Jordan

Hannah thought back to her first time with Aidan, remembering how utterly certain she'd felt then, how confident that she was carrying out God's will. This feeling was entirely different. She had only her own volition to follow, her own desire to act upon, or not. Whatever decision she made would be hers alone. — Hillary Jordan

Was that all her religious beliefs had ever been then, a set of precepts so deeply inculcated in her that they became automatic, even instinctive? Hear the word God, think He. See the misery of humankind, blame Eve. Obey your parents, be a good girl, vote Trinity Party, never sit with your legs apart. Don't question, just do as you're told. — Hillary Jordan

Reverend Easter waved her hand dismissively. "It doesn't matter to God what we call ourselves, or even what we call Him. We're the only ones who care about that. But as an Episcopalian and not an evangelical," she said, with a knowing look at Hannah, "I'll answer your question with another question, or rather, with a bunch of them, which is how we tend to do things. How else do you explain the miracle of your beating heart, the compassion of strangers, the existence of Mozart and Rilke and Michelangelo? How do you account for redwoods and hummingbirds, for orchids and nebulas? How can such beauty possibly exist without God? And how can we see it and know it's beautiful and be moved by it, without God?" Hannah — Hillary Jordan

Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. I'll begin with that. With Love. — Hillary Jordan

When the river takes me I don't try to swim or stay afloat. I open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there's no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I'm flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I've ever been. — Hillary Jordan

The creature was weeping, and who could blame it, as hideous and abject and lonely as it was? But its tears, Hannah perceived suddenly, didn't just spring from wretchedness. They were also tears of relief, because it was alive, because it had survived another day. How could anything be grateful for such an existence? And yet, this creature was, and when it saw itself and knew that it wanted to live in spite of everything, it wept even harder, sobbing inconsolably until it was depleted. — Hillary Jordan

How could predetermination and free will both exist? "It's — Hillary Jordan

She experienced a moment of incandescent wonder, a sense of being connected, not just to these people, but to everyone and everything alive: every beating heart, every fluttering wing, every green shoot thrusting itself up out of the earth, seeking, as she was, the sun. — Hillary Jordan

To be touched with love was a kind of miracle. — Hillary Jordan

I knew their kind: locked in the imagined glory of the past, scared of losing what they thought was theirs. — Hillary Jordan

I had a few pricks of conscience- seeing Henry's pajama bottoms hanging forlornly from a peg in our bedroom, his comb on he dresser, a stray white hair on his pillow- but real shame and regret were absent. In their place was a riotous sense of wonder. I'd never imagined myself capable of either great boldness or great passion, and the discovery that I had reservoirs of both astounded me. — Hillary Jordan

There's a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside. — Hillary Jordan

It wasn't just that he loved her; it was that he loved her, in particular. — Hillary Jordan

She'd crossed into a place where truth, even if it was brutal, was all she had to offer. — Hillary Jordan

She stood by the bed and stroked her father's hand, knowing how desperately afraid he must feel at this moment. He'd always prided himself on being the kind of man who could be counted on, a man to whom others looked for advice and support. Dependence would wither his spirit, and the thought of that, of her father being diminished or broken, was almost as unbearable as the thought of losing him. — Hillary Jordan

She wondered how many of them were liars; their outer purity masking crimes as dark or darker than her own. How many would be chromes themselves, if the truth in their hearts were revealed. — Hillary Jordan

There are infinite kinds of love, Reverend Dale liked to say, but charity is the purest of them all, because it's the only one that doesn't ask, What's in it for me? — Hillary Jordan

This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along. — Hillary Jordan

Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right. — Hillary Jordan

One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box ... the mistress box ... the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes ... She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again. — Hillary Jordan

[He] had a hole in his soul, the kind the devil loves to find. It's like an open doorway for him, lets him enter in and do his wicked work. — Hillary Jordan

When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patched across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown. When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker. — Hillary Jordan

With the cruel natural order that had made me simultaneously undesirable to men and unable to feel complete without one. — Hillary Jordan

You got to go along to get along. — Hillary Jordan

I loved all my children, but I loved Ronsel the most. If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place. — Hillary Jordan

Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his daddy gone be off somewhere else. — Hillary Jordan

You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone to let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone to send Florence and Lilly Mae to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying there half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you. — Hillary Jordan

The Bible is full of thou-shalt-nots. Thou shalt not kill, that's one. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, that's two. Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife - three and four. Notice how none of them have any loopholes. There are no dependent clauses you can hang your sins on, like: Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife, unless thou art wandering in the blackest hell, lost to yourself and to every memory of light and goodness, and uncovering her nakedness is the only way back to yourself. No, the Bible's absolute when it comes to most things. It's why I don't believe in God.
Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn't understand that can go fuck Himself.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain - that's five. — Hillary Jordan

That's what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must. — Hillary Jordan

Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It's in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman they's itching for. White men already got her, they thinking, You mine now, just wait and see what I'm gone do to you. Colored men ain't got her and ain't never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her. — Hillary Jordan

The truth isn't so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. — Hillary Jordan

You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will. — Hillary Jordan

Florence may have sensed something, but I had no idea of what I was setting in motion the day I gave Ronsel Jackson a lift from town. — Hillary Jordan

She'd been taught that pants were inappropriate for girls because they were immodest [ ... ] If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. There was almost always a bulge
you couldn't help but notice it
and if the pants were tight, you could see practically everything. And the way men were always drawing attention to it! Touching and scratching themselves with total unselfconsciousness, as if they were alone and not in public. She'd even seen Aidan do it a few times, absent-mindedly. And yet no one accused men of being improper or of encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything. — Hillary Jordan

I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. — Hillary Jordan

A bruised silence descended on the van. — Hillary Jordan

She reached out and stroked my hair just as she had when I was a child. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me, feeling utterly safe. — Hillary Jordan

I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here. — Hillary Jordan

She prayed for that all through the night, uncertain to Whom or what, but with a feeling that almost resembled faith. — Hillary Jordan

Henry was wholly preoccupied with the farm. I would have gotten more notice from him if I'd grown a tail and started to bray. — Hillary Jordan

If God is the Creator, if God englobes every single thing in the universe, then God is everything, and everything is God. God is the earth and the sky, and the tree planted in the earth under the sky, and the bird in the tree, and the worm in the beak of the bird, and the dirt in the stomach of the worm. God is He and She, straight and gay, black and white and red - yes even that ... and green and blue and all the rest. And so, to despise me for loving women or you for being a Red who made love with a woman, would be to despise not only His own creations but also to hate Himself. My God is not so stupid as that. — Hillary Jordan

It wasn't her fault if she seemed less than human, it was the fault of them that did this to her, and them that didn't raise a voice against it. — Hillary Jordan

I talked to her just like I talk to a laboring woman. Mothers need to hear them soothing words. They just as important as the medicines, sometimes even more. — Hillary Jordan

Jamie didn't talk to me about the war. Most men don't, who've seen real combat. It's the ones who spent their tours well behind the lines who want to tell you all about it, and the ones who never served who want to know. — Hillary Jordan

You'll move if I say so," Hap said. "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church." "Only so long as he alive," I said. "For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans. — Hillary Jordan

How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if. — Hillary Jordan