Edward Kelsey Moore · 384 pages
Rating: (9.6K votes)
“Something Mama liked to say: “I love Jesus, but some of his representatives sure make my ass tired.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“I was free to appreciate the quiet and the way the yellowish-gray light of the rising sun entered the room, turning everything from black and white to color. The journey from Kansas to Oz right in my own kitchen.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“I called up to Mama, "Is this a miracle?" She raised and lowered her shoulders. Her voice drifted down, "Maybe. Or maybe this is just what's supposed to be.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“Mama sneered at them. “I know you and Clarice are friends, but you can’t tell me you don’t wanna slap the livin’ shit outta that mother of hers. Talk about somebody with her head stuffed way up her own ass. And that sister of hers is just as bad. As far back as I can remember, Beatrice and Gory been usin’ Jesus as an excuse to be bitches.” She wagged her finger at them and, like they could hear her, said, “That’s right, I said it!”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“Later, Barbara Jean would remember looking at those eyes and thinking, This must be what the sky looks like if you see it through a diamond.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“As far back as I can remember, Beatrice and Glory been usin’ Jesus as an excuse to be bitches.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“Mama let out a snort. “Talk about a nerve. I guess she’s too good for my house now. She oughta try to sell that bullshit to some folks who don’t remember where she came from. And what kind of ‘working’ did she do to get outta Leanin’ Tree? All she did was outlive her lowlife daddy. Odette, tell her your mama’s back and that she’s fixin’ to haunt the fuck outta her. Go on, tell ‘er.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“Our annual January get-together was a long-running tradition, going back to the first year of our marriage. The truth, even though he denies this, is that the first party was an attempt by James to prove to his friends that I wasn’t as bad a choice of a mate as I seemed. Richmond and Ramsey—and others, most likely—had warned James that a big-mouthed, hot-tempered woman like me could never be properly tamed. But James was determined to show them that I could, on occasion, be as domestic and wifely as any other woman. I suspect he’s still trying to convince them.”
― Edward Kelsey Moore, quote from The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
“I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze.”
― Vanessa Diffenbaugh, quote from The Language of Flowers
“Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from The Moonstone
“Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.
And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about--lovers, children--will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind you is no life at all. Here, you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you to die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awaken in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Book of Lost Things
“The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The Illustrated Man
“Okay, listen to me,” the old man said, his voice muffled behind his own swath of fabric. “We need to set some things straight before we get up there. We can’t let our emotions rule everything. No matter what we see, our number one priority has to be saving as many people as possible.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Kill Order
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