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“Used to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit. Milly would put a kettle on and set out whatever culinary adventure she'd gone on that day. For morning arrivals, she offered her famous vanilla drop biscuits and raspberry jam. Twiss would get the medicine bag from the hall closet and sterilize the tools she needed, depending on the seriousness of the injury. A wounded limb was one thing. A wounded crop was another.
People used to come from as far away as Reedsburg and Wilton. Milly would sit with them while Twiss patched up the 'poor old robin' or the 'sweet little meadowlark.' Over the years, the number of visitors had dwindled. Now that the grocery store sold ready-bake biscuits and jelly in all the colors of the rainbow, people didn't bother as much about birds.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly, understands that fat is always ugly and that ugly and skinny makes a woman eminently more desirable than fat and any combination such as beautiful, charming, intelligent, or kind. Milly is ally those things.”
― Roxane Gay

“What would your word be?" Twiss said.
Something to do with baking. Whenever Milly could scrape together enough flour, sugar, and butter, she'd bake a dessert. Often, her parents would stop what they were doing and wander into the kitchen, where Twiss would already be sitting with a napkin tucked into the collar of her shirt. Something about sugar made their family sweeter.
"'Sugar,'" Milly said to Twiss, measuring out two cups' worth.
She mixed the batter and poured it into a cake pan. After she put the pan in the oven, she gave Twiss the bowl to lick and took the spoon for herself.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“The idea of Milly drowning in the riverside made Twiss think of an angel falling from the sky; Milly had two pink birthmarks the size of dimes on her back, which always made Twiss think of wings.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“While their mother told Mrs. Bettle and Bett about her trip to France when she was a girl- 'Oh, Champs-Elysées!'- Milly hauled out a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a sack of dried kidney beans from the pantry. She opened her recipe book, looking for something to make out of the available ingredients: milk, flour, butter, and kidney beans. When she didn't find a recipe, she decided to do what every woman in the country did when she lacked materials: bake a pie. Not every woman would have made a kidney bean pie, though.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Milly went to work on her piecrust. After she'd rolled out the bottom layer and then the top one, she moved on to the kidney beans. She didn't know that the beans had to be soaked in warm water overnight and then cooked for several hours otherwise they'd upset the digestive tract- 'to the point of tears,' Milly would read later in the cookbook. She plucked a sprig of thyme from her herb box on the windowsill and dropped it, along with the beans, into the pie.
'Poor things,' she said to her herbs, stroking their leaves, which were soft as feathers.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“The town fair, which took place over the last weekend of August each year, was just over a month away. If their family agreed about anything, it was the town fair. Twiss loved the Wild West game and the spun sugar; their father loved the putting game and the caramel apples; their mother loved the bean counting game- last year she'd guessed 1,245 beans and won a forty-pound sack of kidney beans- and the Ferris wheel; and Milly loved what everyone else loved, except the livestock show and the amateur rodeo, where boys from the 4-H club wrestled calves to the ground for giant gold belt buckles.
Milly also loved how the fair transformed the abandoned field behind the high school from twenty-five dandelion-inhabited acres that went unnoticed most of the year into a kind of fairy-tale place, where people sucked on cherry-flavored ice chips and honey-roasted peanuts, and the Ferris wheel went round and round, and the firecrackers reached higher and higher.”
― Rebecca Rasmussen, The Bird Sisters

“Got it in two. It would’ve been funny if you’d got it straight away, honest.â€�
’Sure. Look, I’m sorry, but I’m whacked right now . . .� Milly’s heart sank. He was going to cry off. �. . . what with the flight, the delay and some other stuff, so I’m not too quick on the uptake. You might have to nod when you make a joke.�
Milly nodded. She was so relieved she could have hugged him. ‘That wasn’t a joke. That nod, I mean. That was just me agreeing.�
Mitch laughed. ‘I’m slow, but not that slow,â€� he said.”
― Dominic Holland, Only in America

“Milly felt nothing but she was very good at making men think otherwise. Sometimes she nearly convinced herself.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“We were something small that needed you more than these plants!”
― Sana Takeda, The Night Eaters, Vol. 1: She Eats the Night