The 19th Wife

Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn't paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that's love.

I trust you have seen the ocean. If you have, then you have witnessed the divine. How barren the ground is in comparison! If I could count the hours I have spent staring out at it! And yet those hours never feel lost. I cannot imagine how else I could refill them were I given a second chance.

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

Isn't it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.

Do you know what I miss most about Rosemary? Simply knowing she was there.

I suppose my greatest disappointment has been realizing my father, like Joseph and Brigham before him, tried to shroud his passions in the mantle of religion. He used God to defend his adultery. --- Ann Eliza Young, page 253

There is nothing more alarming to a boy than seeing a mother, or a father, buckling. It says to him that all will not be well. The boy does not know this, but he senses it, as a dog senses it, as a dog sense his master's true state of mind. (Lorenzo Dee)

What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.

Isn't a gay Mormon like an oxymoron?' 'Do I look like an oxymoron to you?' 'An oxymormon.

You will loose everything" "I already have.

I, of course, cherish my freedom, but I shall never want my freedom to restrict the freedom of another. In that case then I am not truly free, and none of us is truly free.

My duty, I know, is to lead. I cannot offer an array of options. I must offer a long but narrow path to Salvation, and guide the Saints down it. Were that path wide and varied, it would lead nowhere; and I will then have failed both God and man.

Upon the exposure of his bribery, it is reported he said, “I should have paid more.

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many and never easy to explain

I write not for sensation, but for Truth. I leave judgement to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.

Under what circumstances does such outrage thrive? The territory of Utah, glorious as it may be, spiked by granite peaks and red jasper rocks, cut by echoing canyons and ravines, spread upon a wide basin of gamma grass and wandering streams, this land of blowing snow and sand, of iron, copper, and the great salten sea.

Under some Divine plan, it seems Destiny intended these two noble creatures to be united in either matrimony or warfare, if there is a difference. As the battle begins, we shall mount our hill with somber hearts to watch out over the carnage.

Sometimes when you’re driving down a back road in Utah, you think if there is a God, then he probably had something to do with all of this. It’s just that fucking beautiful.

I wish I could claim I faced my first day of apostasy with courage and certainty. Yet in truth, I had never felt more afraid.

Love and trust are Siamese twins, as conjoined as Chang and Eng.