Sally Owens Quotes

“The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.”

“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”

“Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for its sake.”

“Tonight Sally and Gillian will concentrate on the rain, and tomorrow on the blue sky. They will do the best they can, but they will always be the girls they once were, dressed in their black coats, walking home through the fallen leaves to a house where no one could see into the windows, and no one could see out. At twilight they will always think of those women who would do anything for love. And in spite of everything, they will discover that this, above all others, is their favorite time of day. It’s the hour when they remember everything the aunts taught them. It’s the hour they’re most grateful for.”

“If there’s one thing Sally is now certain of, it’s how you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. Those are her daughters, the girls she wanted to lead normal lives, and she’s allowing them to stand over a pile of bones with a spaghetti pot filled mostly with lye. What has happened to her?”

″‘You can’t fall apart,’ Gillian would insist in her rich, urgent voice. ‘That’s my job,’ she’d say.”

“For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street.”

″‘Life is for the living,’ Gillian told her. ‘Life is what you make of it. Come on. Just listen to what I’m saying. Please.‘”

“There’s one factor she forgot to figure into her anxiety equation, and that’s jealousy.”

“His grandfather told him once that witches caught you in this way- they knew how much most men love themselves and how deeply they’ll let themselves be drawn in, just for a glimpse of their own image. If you ever come face to face with a woman like this, his grandfather told him, turn and run... But of course, Gary has no intention of doing anything like that. He intends to go on drowning for a very long time.”