Explore Book Quotes

“I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched me most....” (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart.”

“Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society.”

“If you’re going to argue, and Jane usually was, you want people to line up all their objections at a time; then you can knock them all down at once.”

“The entrance hall was a strange place. As they stepped in, a similar door opened at the far end of the house and another man and boy entered there. Then Toseland saw that it was only themselves in a big mirror. The walls around him were partly rough stone and partly paster, but hung all over with mirrors and pictures and china.”

“However, I won’t dispute it, let me be a braggart, why not brag, if it hurts no one?

“JUROR #8: Look, this boy’s been kicked around all his life. You know - living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That’s not a very good head start. He had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That’s all.”

“If I take away the consequences of people’s choices, I destroy the possibility of love. Love that is forced is no love at all.”

“The truth is—and how long it has been true, I’m not sure, but it was true in my generation and it is true of girls growing up today—an American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be.”

″‘Grandaddy came here in his mama’s, Sarah’s, arms,’ Jones said quietly. ‘She wasn’t free yet. The war wasn’t started but it was coming. Only Sarah couldn’t wait. I expect she ran until she found a place big enough to free her troubles. Just the clothes on her back, that half-dead child and the song she sang to him, my granddaddy. He grew up and sang it to my daddy. And he to me.‘”

“I wonder if I’ll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we’re living or no life at all.”