“[H]e went ahead and named them without her, pulling from the spiral notebook of names they'd been collecting, putting together first and middle names with no rhyme or reason . . . names that obviously didn't flow.”

“Polly had always marveled . . . that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product [American cheese] after itself, yet hungry Rose . . . gleefully ate every individually wrapped, plastic little one of them.”

“It's the greatest of Southern honors . . . to have one's name incorporated into a family tree. It's an honor not lightly given.”

“If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.”

“[N]ames were what you wore forever, and she felt that she'd sent her daughters out in tacky rabbit fur coats when they should have been wrapped in mink.”

“...the women are drinking and laughing inside somewhere, Wallis guesses, as manless as these men are without women.”

“None of her spells are planned, but come to her like snatches of poetry or a doodle on a napkin.”