The Good Daughter

sometimes, your world turns upside down, and you need somebody to show you how to walk on your hands before you can find your feet again.

I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart

It is a father’s job to love his daughter in the way that she needs to be loved.

What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it's worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.

a Democrat is a Republican who’s been through the criminal justice system.

A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial.

Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.

You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.

I've always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.

I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.

Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you've got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.

Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared.

She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn't sleep too much, didn't breathe too much, didn't live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.

people found off-putting. You could not beat her at chess or Trivial Pursuit or even Monopoly. She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.

People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action. And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.

Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.

all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.

Dogs are stupid,” Rusty said. “This is a known fact. But a cat—you have to earn a cat’s respect every single day of your life. You lose it and—” He snapped his fingers. “That’s what your mama was to me. She was my cat. She kept my compass pointing true north.

A possum stared at me through the door all night.” “That’s Bill.” Charlie turned on the giant television. “He’s my lover.

got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.

I was told you take your capital cases seriously down here.

a large chifforobe wedged into a small closet that their mother said they’d have to pay Tom Robinson a nickel to bust up.

A person who has been up close when a gun is fired into another human being never mistakes the sound of a gunshot for something else.

Redneck alarm,” Charlie told her. You couldn’t step foot in the Holler without a hundred dogs howling your arrival. The deeper in you went, the more young white men you’d see standing on their front porches, one hand holding their cell phone and the other under their shirt rubbing their belly.

Every place always has somebody who doesn’t fit in. That’s what makes them fit in.

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.’ ” “The Golden Rule,” Charlie said. “Do unto others as they do unto you.