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“Don’t let it happen to you, Betty. Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. You don’t wanna live so long only to realize, you ain’t lived at all.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“It occurred to me then that to be a child is to know the cradle rocks both toward the parent and away from them. That is the ebb and flow of life, swinging toward and away from one another, perhaps so we build up the strength for that one moment we will be rocked so far away, the person we love the most is gone by the time we return.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself. So when I turned seventeen, an age that gives one permission to light the flame of new passions, I decided to refuse hate's ambition.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“I realized then that not only did Dad need us to believe his stories, we needed to believe them as well. To believe in unripe stars and eagles able to do extraordinary things. What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowinâ€� tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leaninâ€� back against a wall, watchinâ€� a girl walk by on her way home, knowinâ€� she’ll never get there.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“My father's hands were soil. My mother's were rain. No wonder they could not hold one another without causing enough mud for two. And yet out of that mud, they built us a house that became a home”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“...my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters. It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained. Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“A girl comes of age against the knife. She must learn to bear its blade. To be cut. To bleed.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“My sister was just another girl doomed by politics and ancestral texts that say a girl’s destiny is to be wholesome, obedient, and quietly attractive, but invisible when need be. Nailed to the cross of her own gender, a girl finds herself between the mother and the prehistoric rib, where there’s little space to be anything other than a daughter who lives alongside sons but is not equal to them. These boys who can howl like tomcats in heat, pawing their way through a feast of flesh, never to be called a slut or a whore like my sister was.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Some men know the exact amount of money in their bank accounts,â€� she continued. “Other men know how many miles are on their car and how many more miles it’ll handle. Other men know the batting average of their favorite baseball player and more other men know the exact sum Uncle Sam has screwed ’em. Your father knows no such figures. The only numbers Landon Carpenter has in his head are the numbers of stars in the sky on the days his children were born. I don’t know about you, but I would say that a man who has skies in his head full of the stars of his children, is a man who deserves his child’s love. Especially from the child with the most stars.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“One day,â€� I told him, ‘God will turn out all the lights to remind people like you that in the dark, you won’t be able to tell who is white like you and who ain’t. We’ll have to treat one another equally. We’ll learn it’s not our skin color that makes us good or bad. And only when we learn that, will God turn the lights back on.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“I realized then that pants and skirts, like gender itself, were not seen as equal in our society. To wear pants was to be dressed for power. But to wear a skirt was to be dressed to wash the dishes.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Folks think it’s when they beg you to stay, but it’s when they let you go that you know they love you so goddamn much.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Fraya says it means you’re a woman.â€� “Why we have to bleed to earn it?â€� Flossie slammed her fists on the mattress. “What happens when we get old and it stops? What then? We stop beinâ€� a woman? Ain’t the blood that defines us. It’s our soul.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Boys are like that, always trying to pretend they're saving girls from something. They never seem to realize we can save ourselves.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“A girl comes of age against the knife, Betty.â€� She softly tucked my hair behind my ears before kissing me on the forehead. “But the woman she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her. May you have the strength.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The heaviest thing in the world is a man on top of you when you don't want him to be.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Sometimes I think the universe is just a glow. The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It's all in the small glowin' tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin' back against a wall, watchin' a girl walk by on her way home, knowin' she'll never get there.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“My heart is made of glass and if I ever lose you, Betty, my heart will break into more hurt than eternity would have time to heal.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Like the night before, I found her naked and sitting on the edge of her bed. Unaware I was there, she continued to massage her legs, their blue-green veins twisting beneath her skin. I wasn't as afraid seeing her body this second night. In the folds and creases, I saw her history. Her skin was the diary of her soul. All the springs she had watched the flowers bloom. The summers she had stood before the moon and kissed its face. The autumns she had grown wiser. The winters that had frozen the initials of her name. Each wrinkle was a record of this and of every hour, minute, and second she had lived. All her secrets were written in her skin. The things she had asked God for. The things she had cursed the devil about. In such age before me, I saw only beauty.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The two wolves live inside all of us,â€� Dad had said. “They fight until one of them is killed.â€� When I asked him which wolf lives, he said, “The one you nourish and love.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Funny that ‘sheâ€� should be in ‘sheet,â€� ain’t it? I reckon it’s just another way to lay on a woman and get away with it.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“I realized then that the whole time I thought I'd been walking alone, my father had been with me. Supportin' me. Steadyin' me. Protectin' me, best he could. I knew I had to be strong enough to stand on my own two feet. I had to step out of my father's hands and pull myself up out of the mud. I thought I would be scared to walk the rest of my life without him, but I know I'll never really be without him because each step I take, I see his handprints in the footprints I leave behind.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“I had come to realize that buried secrets are just seeds that grow more sin.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The pony's head rose above the open roof as her mane whipped in the wind. I knew she must be thinking of running free through tallgrass fields, wild daisies slapping her shins, no one to hold her down.
I slid my hand up her leg, feeling raised ridges of whip scars. The tips of her ears had been cut. There were smaller scars across her nose. A knife had been used there, perhaps only to remind her who she belonged to. She had lived by the orders and commands of men. Her entire existence on earth and she had never once been allowed to be free. She had been imprisoned and owned, as if all of her value was wrapped up in how large a load she could carry on her back.
She had lived her life to the point of being given away, her legs too weak to run, her eyes no longer able to see a world beyond the coal cave she was forced to spend her life in. And yet, now she could feel the wind in her mane. She was not too dead for this small kindness that delivered her from a past of hell to a moment she could believe she was free enough to gallop as she wished.
Is this love? she must have been asking herself. Am I finally loved?”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Some little girls grow up with fathers who are decent, kind and tenderly nested by their daughter's heart. Other little girls grow up with no father at all, thus ignorant of good men and the not so good ones. The unluckiest of all little girls grow up with fathers who know how to make storms out of sunshine and blue skies. My mother was one such unlucky little girl and suffered the childhood you run away from. Except, if you have nowhere to run to”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Imagine havin' wings, Betty. There wouldn't be nothin' too high. Nothin' you wouldn't be able to get to the top of. You can't fall with wings. God wasted 'em on birds and bats. He should have given wings to us.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“They are good because they have been danced in. Shoes that have been danced in are of better character than those that have merely been stood in.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Your life is what makes you rich,' they insisted. 'The people you love and the people who love you back”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Between God and Devil, our family tree grew with rotten roots, broken branches, and fungus on the leaves”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty