Quotes from Not a Drop to Drink

“Do you want to die like this?" Mother had asked, that night and every night since then.

Lynn's answer never changed. "No."

And Mother's response, their evening prayer. "Then you will have to kill.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“There's a famous line from a poem about the ocean," Mother had finally said to end the discussion. "'Water water every where, but not a drop to drink.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Regret was for people with nothing to defend, people who had no water.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“You can't change the things you've done. It's now and the here on out you've got control of.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“There's different ways of doing things wrong, Lynn, and not all of it is choosing to hurt others. Sometimes it's the things you don't do that make you feel the worst.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Why do you always quote poetry at me when all I want is a straight answer?”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Type of men who gather up seven of themselves to attack two women in the middle of the night generally won't go back for dead friends.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Things have changed," Mother answered, her gaze drawn to the southern horizon. "So we change with them.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Just know that there's bad men in the world, and dying fast by your mother is a better way than theirs.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Where you go, he'll go," Stebbs said.

"I know it."

"Tough caring about people, isn't it?"

... "Wouldn't trade it," she said.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Another low moan rose from the grass. "That was a good shot," Mother said, nodding toward it.

"Not good enough."

Mother shrugged. "It was dark." She rose and stretched out her stiff body, a sign that she truly felt safe. "You'll get better."

Another cry. Mother licked her finger, tested the wind, and fired once into the night.

Silence fell.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Kiddo, you and me don't do so well in situations we can't control.'

'Don't think I care for that.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Lynn kept her eye to the scope, unable to look away from the path of the only bullet she had ever fired with love in her heart.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Men got two guns, you know. One for now," he tapped the barrel of his gun against her nose. "And one for later." When his free hand went to his zipper, she twisted underneath him, bringing her knee into his groin and pulling her knife from her boot.
"Mother taught me to carry a knife for always."
She left him holding his intestines in disbelief as she disappeared down the hill, his gun tucked securely in her waistband.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Killing people was easier when the only face I ever saw was Mother’s back then, anyone else was the enemy and shooting at an outline in a scope wasn’t any different than taking down a deer, just in a different shape.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“I’d lost everything I had. I didn’t have the heart to take from someone else.” “Plus I would’ve sniped your ass.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“I'd say he's not much older than you," Mother said when she noticed.

"Really?" Lynn peered closer at his face. "How can you tell?"

"Well," Mother peered up at the gray sky as she considered how to answer, "I guess it's in the way his skin isn't so tough, he's still got the little bit of baby soft on him.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Lynn pulled her own rifle into her lap, the cold metal bringing more comfort to her than Mother’s touch ever could. Her finger curled around the trigger, hugging it tight in the life-taking embrace that she’d learned so long ago. She slipped onto her belly beside Mother, watching the sunlight bounce off the twin barrels of their rifles. Waiting was always the worst part, the crack of the rifle a relief.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

“Do you want to die like this?” Mother had asked that night and every night since then.
Lynn’s answer never changed. “No.”
And Mother’s response, their evening prayer. “Then you will have to kill.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from Not a Drop to Drink

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Popular quotes

“he is the personification of sensible silence.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, quote from Wives and Daughters

“I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation.

I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself.

But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down.

Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth.

I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder.
"Begin," I command.
"It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from The Lords of Discipline

“I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few - like Scott - harness their dreams and turn them into horses.”
― Stephen King, quote from Lisey's Story

“I wasn't born, I was unleashed.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Dance with the Devil

“What's a mediator you ask? Oh, a person who acts as a liason between the living and the dead. Hey, wait a minute...what're you doing with that strait jacket?-Suze Simon's imagination”
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