“What we can't speak, we say in silence.”
―
Hillary Jordan,
Mudbound
“This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“The truth isn't so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“That's what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“If God is the Creator, if God englobes every single thing in the universe, then God is everything, and everything is God. God is the earth and the sky, and the tree planted in the earth under the sky, and the bird in the tree, and the worm in the beak of the bird, and the dirt in the stomach of the worm. God is He and She, straight and gay, black and white and red - yes even that...and green and blue and all the rest. And so, to despise me for loving women or you for being a Red who made love with a woman, would be to despise not only His own creations but also to hate Himself. My God is not so stupid as that.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can't expect no sense from her. She'll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain't in her way. That's the Lord's doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain't around to do it most of the time. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can't help but look after that child.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“There's a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box...the mistress box...the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes...She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“You got to go along to get along.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. I'll begin with that. With Love.” ― Hillary Jordan
“She'd been taught that pants were inappropriate for girls because they were immodest [...] If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. There was almost always a bulge--you couldn't help but notice it--and if the pants were tight, you could see practically everything. And the way men were always drawing attention to it! Touching and scratching themselves with total unselfconsciousness, as if they were alone and not in public. She'd even seen Aidan do it a few times, absent-mindedly. And yet no one accused men of being improper or of encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“THE WASHINGTON POST headline across page one in its editions of Wednesday, January 21, 1998, was shocking: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie.” Bill had spent a tense night and early morning on the phone with Vernon Jordan, Bob Bennett, Bruce Lindsey, David Kendall, and Betty Currie, talking about the story and trying to keep his legal ducks aligned. Hillary said later he nudged her awake just after 7 A.M. and sat on the edge of their bed. “You’re not going to believe this,” she quoted him telling her, but there were “news reports” blanketing the Internet and airwaves as well, that he had had an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers.” ― Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge
“I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“The truth isn't so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“That's what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“If God is the Creator, if God englobes every single thing in the universe, then God is everything, and everything is God. God is the earth and the sky, and the tree planted in the earth under the sky, and the bird in the tree, and the worm in the beak of the bird, and the dirt in the stomach of the worm. God is He and She, straight and gay, black and white and red - yes even that...and green and blue and all the rest. And so, to despise me for loving women or you for being a Red who made love with a woman, would be to despise not only His own creations but also to hate Himself. My God is not so stupid as that.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can't expect no sense from her. She'll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain't in her way. That's the Lord's doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain't around to do it most of the time. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can't help but look after that child.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“There's a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box...the mistress box...the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes...She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“You got to go along to get along.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment.” ― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
“Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. I'll begin with that. With Love.” ― Hillary Jordan
“She'd been taught that pants were inappropriate for girls because they were immodest [...] If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. There was almost always a bulge--you couldn't help but notice it--and if the pants were tight, you could see practically everything. And the way men were always drawing attention to it! Touching and scratching themselves with total unselfconsciousness, as if they were alone and not in public. She'd even seen Aidan do it a few times, absent-mindedly. And yet no one accused men of being improper or of encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
“THE WASHINGTON POST headline across page one in its editions of Wednesday, January 21, 1998, was shocking: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie.” Bill had spent a tense night and early morning on the phone with Vernon Jordan, Bob Bennett, Bruce Lindsey, David Kendall, and Betty Currie, talking about the story and trying to keep his legal ducks aligned. Hillary said later he nudged her awake just after 7 A.M. and sat on the edge of their bed. “You’re not going to believe this,” she quoted him telling her, but there were “news reports” blanketing the Internet and airwaves as well, that he had had an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers.” ― Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge
“I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here.” ― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke
