Shirley Abbott Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

As I grew to adolescence, I imagined, from closely observing the boredom and vexations of matrimony, that the act my parents committed and the one I so longed to commit must be two different things.

Shirley Abbott
Anybody who grows up in the South may have to reckon, some time or another, with being born again.

Shirley Abbott
My father, dead so long now, looms up as unexplored landscape, the mountains of the moon, a text that has lain in a drawer, undeciphered, for which I have had no Rosetta Stone.

Shirley Abbott
Her food had been a form of vengeance, the ultimate in female passive aggression, the punishment males had so richly earned for demanding three meals a day but never peeling a potato or washing a plate.

Shirley Abbott
You washed those parts quickly, without looking at them. They had no names. Good people were required to refer to them with prepositions, rather than straightforwardly with nouns, as with decent things like tables and chairs. 'Down there.' 'In between.' 'Behind.'

Shirley Abbott
Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.

Shirley Abbott
People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal.

Shirley Abbott
To grow up female in the South is to inherit a set of directives that warp one for life, if they do not actually induce psychosis.

Shirley Abbott
The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

Shirley Abbott
All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.

Shirley Abbott
Whatever your color or creed may be, when you get too close to civilization, you can probably expect to be done in.

Shirley Abbott
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

Shirley Abbott
The South may be the last place where dying is still sometimes a community project.

Shirley Abbott
This curious sense of separateness is one of the most stubbornly preserved Southern attitudes. The South, its historians say, stands apart from other American regions because of its peculiar history. History has been cruel to Southerners, has persistently dealt them deuces.

Shirley Abbott
If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.

Shirley Abbott
No better story than a horse race has ever been written. It takes less time than the telling of it, is as irreversible as a meteor's plunge, as inevitable as death, and you can't ever know the outcome in advance.

Shirley Abbott
If the production of self-serving folklore qualified as an industry, the South would have been an industrial power since colonial times.

Shirley Abbott
Everybody must learn this lesson somewhere — that it costs something to be what you are.

Shirley Abbott
She said they [injections of morphine] didn't kill the pain but locked her up inside it.

Shirley Abbott
This was the dawn of plastic eating in America.... We doted on Velveeta. Spam. Canned ravioli. Instant puddings. Instant anything. The further a thing was from the texture, flavor, and terrifying unpredictability of real food, the better.

Shirley Abbott