15 Quotes by Kelsey Brickl

I was scarcely the first, nor the only current, girl of impressive derivation to be unceremoniously thrust through the iron gate at the entrance of Le Murate by parents whose aspirations for their daughters did not include marriage. Our paths to the convent were varied, but no matter. We all wound up in the same habit.

The ground had opened up and spit out hell, Nell thought, and the detritus was Shiloh.

When some women felt fear, they covered it with an iron grate of courage, I thought. Men might be dangerous, but they were very often unperceptive. If fear only rumbled through a woman’s soul and glittered through her eyes, then perhaps the man she feared would not be aware it was there at all. He might even think that she was entirely confident, dauntless. He might believe her veneer of bravery.

Youth is as easily wasted as a fine wine consumed by a drunken man. There is no poetry in aging, and Javert lived out the process in its most hideous iteration.

It wasn’t that Nell was weak. It was that the world was dangerous.

She was an afterthought, little Martha. She was treated the way many families treated pet dogs - she had to be fed and cleaned every now and then, but she was left to her own devices for the most part.

Sometimes the smoke from the factories and riverboats and trains would obscure the night sky entirely. But the town's industrial breath was blowing somewhere else tonight, and so the Armstrong house was bathed in starlight. Nell studied the little white specks, like glittering dust on black velvet, and she asked,"You boys ever wonder what it'd be like to be somewhere else?

Thus, in the boy’s mind, drink and destruction braided together. Intoxication, he concluded, was a swift and effective catalyst for havoc.

In August, an inescapable blanket of heat settled over Paducah, the last gasping breath of summer roaring its weight out over the populace.