Important Quotations Explained
"'You know what?' James asked. 'We're the kind that people go off from. First our father and now Momma. I never thought of that before. Whadda you think, Dicey? Is there something wrong about us?' 'I don't know and I don't care.'"
"Dicey looked at the gravestones about her. She read an inscription: Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea. What a thing to put on a grave. As if to say that being dead was home... Being dead wasn't being home, was it? Unless—and she remember what James had been saying last night—home was the place where you finally stayed, forever and ever. Then this person was home, and nobody would ever be truly home until he, or she, died. It was an awful thought."
"What good did it do, worrying and making plans, and more plans, if the first plans failed. It was like money. If you had it, good. I you didn't, then you had to find a way to earn it. There was nothing to be gained by fretting over maybes."
"Dicey noticed from above what could not be seen from below. There were strong twisted wires running around the tree. 'Why is it wired?' she asked. 'Because paper mulberries are fragile,' her grandmother answered. 'It's the way they spread out at the top, it's the way they grow. If you didn't brace it, the weight of the leaves and the growing branches would pull the tree apart. Like families.'"
"'Your Momma was a kind child,' her grandmother said. 'But she never forgave her father.' 'Did you?' Dicey asked. 'No. Yes.' Somehow this made sense to Dicey. It let her know that she would be all right and her family would be all right. They wouldn't be children forever. They didn't have to have a place, they just had to have themselves."
