Interesting Quotes from The Moonflower Vine

From The Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton:

"And even though....(several characters)...mean well and feel strong bonds with the other members of their family, their choices invariably strain those bonds." Can't we all identify with these family members?

"To me...these visits (by relatives who visited yearly)...were like income tax, an annual inconvenience. There were always so many other ways we could have spent the time. But, old as we were, our parents were still the government. They levied the tribute, and we paid it."

"Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance...on all the days we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more? There could not be many; for we were a family growing old. And how would I learn to live without these people? I who needed them so little that I could stay away all year -- what would I do without them?" This one puts a catch in my throat.

"'Oh Tom -- I love you!' With a little cry she put her arms around him and married him in her heart."

"Jessica's face knotted like a fist, and a lump the size of a locomotive formed in her throat. ...sick with the knowledge that this was how it would be all the rest of her life. She couldn't stay, but she couldn't stay away, and she would come back time afer time, doomed forever to come and go and endure these ghastly partings...." Parting is such sweet sorrow.

"With a shudder he thought of all the ears and eyes and intrusive female voices waiting for him at the end of the street. He wished there were somewhere else he could go. But there stood the house, baited with supper, and he was trapped."

"Indeed it was the foolishness more than the sin that rankled. One can repent of a sin and have done with it; but the wages of foolishness is the eternal recalling of it."

"He watched the light empty out of the sky and darkness blot up Missouri."

"Maybe she would never go away. Maybe she'd just stand there till she took root and put out branches and a squirrel made a nest in her head."

"A leaf that had hung on the tree since April suddently let go and made its slow journey to earth, tilting this way and that in its new fatal freedom, but falling, steadily falling." The term "fatal freedom" gets the thought processes grinding away. Which of my freedoms will be be fatal for me?

"And time, that great gift that he had given so charily! He dropped his head in shame. the sins of omission...."

"Maybe that was the way it went, that all your life you heard the singing and never got any closer. There were things you'd wanted all your life, and after a while and all of a sudden, you weren't any closer than you ever were and there was not time left.....Where was the fine white house on the corner, where her mind had lived all these years?"