“Quit it already. I'm pretty enough as it is.”

“4. If you do not give your chickens enough space, light, air, and walking-around room, they will eat one another.”

“I'm not done arguing with you, Mrs.Fletcher. I'm going to convince you yet." "Well I reckon I got ten or twenty more years in me before I pass on," Granny told him. "So feel free to take your time.”

“When I think about everything that's happened since school started, well, I don't think the word 'normal' applies to any of it. Verbena is right - I'm way past normal. Only I've realized that when you move beyond normal, the road you're on doesn't necessarily take you to the land of the abnormal or the weird or the freakish. Instead you might find yourself in a place where people build Freedom School and have the courage to live large. It's a place where people don't worry too much when they get a little goat poop on their shoes.”

“Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way.”

“My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress.”

“I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.''Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy.”