“In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling.” — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“They were all odd, the returned captives. All peculiar with minds oddly formed, never quite one thing or another. As Doris had said back in Spanish Fort, all those captured as children and returned were restless and hungry for some… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“No matter what side you were on, if you had survived Gettysburg you were to be congratulated.” — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“He wrote down, in a neat list, all the obligations of a sergeant because written information was what mattered in this world,” — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some wort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share
“This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world. And also that we… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“It seemed to him she understood but was not willing to concede they might be on the same side against anyone or anything.” — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“Outside, as she passed the kitchen window, she watched her breath appear before her in the lamplight and then it died away in moist… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
Paper Matches My aunts washed dishes while the uncles squirted each other on the lawn with garden hoses. Why are we in here, I said, and they are out there? That’s the way it is, said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one. I have the rages that small animals have, being small, being animal. Written on me was a message, “At… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share
“as they drifted they had gathered trouble and a great deal of peculiar knowledge about human beings, what human beings would do or say… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another.” — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share Image
“So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little… — Paulette Jiles Copy Share
