Children of Promise Quotes

“Cakes look good and newborn babies are beautiful; I'm so goddamn gorgeous it's a crime in the east half of the state.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“The difference is, Jimmy was her husband and he's dead, and you're alive and you're a jackass."

"That's real sweet, Daddy. Wish you'd saved it for my next birthday card.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Except that a lie was only easy on the surface; only easy, really, before it's spoken. Then it got hard, and heavy, and painful. It grew, transformed, drawing on nerves, loosening tendons, opening joints. It stole her breath, her sleep, her peace.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“He could imagine his father kicked back in his seat, a disapproving frown set under his heavy mustache; That boy is a fool. Junior wasn't a boy, but he was sure he was a fool, married to a woman who wouldn't even love him if it was up to her, and who wouldn't dance with him besides.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Believe you me, the loss of loving someone's powerful. It's powerful.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Ain't nobody gonna be cutting nobody's balls off in this family.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Abbi's obsession with Shep was tenuous and unnerving, and sitting with both of them always made Llewellyn feel like he was cradling a bomb. Abbi wanted to be exactly like Shep, but he also hated everything about him. They were completely inseparable.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“She was exhausted, but he knew the way she was looking at him; he knew that kind of sweet sadness, loving hard with a crushed and broken heart. She'd always loved him like that, and he didn't know why she kept on that way except that she was tougher than quitting.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“He watched her pace the floor in her bare feet---the floor she'd scrubbed clean seven times now from the mess and afterbirth of new babies.

She'd gotten out the stains [...] in the floor she was pacing now, walking up and down the ordinary wooden boards with bare feet like Moses at the burning bush. Like something sacred had happened there; holy ground.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“She was so small. He forgot, because she was such a tough little spitfire who gave hell worse than most men. But when she held a baby, it always struck him how tiny she was, looking more like a very helpful big sister than a mother with that child taking up so much space in her arms. And he'd think, I can't believe I did that to this pretty little thing. I can't believe she's strong enough to carry it.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Don't know what it is about trouble that draws you men. [...] I'm scared to death of doing something wrong, and there ya'll go chasing it."

"We chase the good things, too, sometimes," he told her hoarsely. "It's just that the wrong ones are so much easier to catch.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Goddamn, had he already resorted to talking about the weather?”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“She'd fallen in love with him walking away, that first night he'd come to call. She'd told him it would be a cold day in hell before she went on a date with the likes of him, and he'd shrugged those broad, square shoulders and told her he'd be back. That he'd get her, one way or the other. And he'd walked away. She'd fallen in love.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“I think it's always easy to judge people who sin different from you.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“...and still Angus drank her in---not ravenously, like the only thing that mattered was clawing off her clothes and devouring her, though the pang of desire to make love to her was always there; no, Angus looked at Jean-Louise like a jewel, like a polished, flawless work of art, fascinating and complicated and beautiful.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“And she didn't seem so unbreakable to him anymore. She seemed even smaller than the carefree lark he'd known before; seemed to him half the width of a wishbone.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“The grit and grimness of it appealed to him, some place dark and dirty and distinctively male; far from his wife's clean-scrubbed kitchen. Far from Eulalia Wakefield's lavender-scented bathtub. He didn't want to be in the kind of place where life was made, cradled, loved into flourishing. He wanted a place that burned, and he wanted to be there all by himself.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Llewellyn sensed something dangerous, something wicked brewing inside Coleman. Something not readily tempered.

"Coleman," he said slowly, "why don't you stick around for a bit? We got a couple jobs could use a feller like you."

"Someone like me," Coleman scoffed. "You mean a big, scary son of a bitch?"

Llewellyn laughed, and nodded, and didn't say---I mean someone angry enough to kill a man.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“It occurred to Llewellyn for the very first time that he loved her. He didn't know why he never told her so. Who more than a Harrison girl needed love, real love? Not the sexy, sleazy kind they were offered only on the sly, but love---the safe constancy of a heart that saw what was real, and special; who had the courage to say so.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“They gaped up at the foreboding frame of Coleman Harrison [...] like a circus freak; at once fascinating and disappointing---exactly how they pictured him, and yet far less than what they were expecting.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Redneck paisan' is goddamn hilarious.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Please don't love me like this, she thought. Please not like this. But just the same she could not bear for him to step away from her. To abandon her, cold and used and foolish. Or worse; to leave her heartbroken and forever mourning this delicate moment between them, with all of its promise of what could have been if they weren't doomed from the start.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“She told her father she wasn't stupid, but she was. She was so goddamn stupid, she didn't even have sense enough to feel ashamed.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“There had never been any wait til your father gets home---not with Jean-Louise. She was frightening enough with a wooden spoon and they minded her. They minded him, too, but in a different way---the way children are inclined to behave for strangers.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Judge, can't I dance with your daughter?"

Judge Beaumont let out a loud scoff. "You? No."

"Well I can't get her pregnant just by dancing, Judge.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Well you can't very well pretend folks ain't the way they are, Em."

"Tarnation," Em huffed. "What do you think being polite even is?”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“And that quiet---with her lips parted for words that wouldn't come, in the soft darkness of woods that were steadily growing blacker, sharper, stretching the space between them until it became hard to make out one another's faces---that quiet was never quite recovered between them. In a way, for years afterward, they never left that forest night when Jean-Louise lay in the grass and Junior learned his back against a tree, and pulled away.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“We actually do have women out in the hills. Damn pretty ones, even."

"Llewellyn, that is no way to be talking about your sister."

"You can go directly to hell, Bill."

Bill grinned. "Fuck you, Jackson, I'm a Catholic. I can't go 'die-rectly' fuckin' nowhere. I got purgatory.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“A few feet of pine boards and thousand miles of heartache gaped between them: hurts they'd given to each other, and hurts they carried all by themselves, because at some point...at some point they had become more apart than they were together. And somehow Junior could know Jean-Louise better than he knew himself, love her better than himself, and still keep his deepest pains locked away from her.

Sometimes, it occurred to him that she might do the same.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“I never would've put you through six children. You've got to know. I never would have kept you the way he's kept you---"

"Wouldn't matter. I'd still have had six by him."

Angus's mouth twisted. "That's the way you love him, then."

"That's how," she said sharply. "It was him or nobody, and never you.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise