“Mamma says God uses the bad times to build strength. Wonder how strong a person needs to be before things get easier.”

“Screw pretty. I'd rather be strong. Pretty fades over time. Strength gets you through the bad shit.”

“It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I am worth dying for.”

“But even now, especially now, it seems to me that women have a strength about them that men never had. And I wonder how did men always get portrayed in the movies and such as the strong ones? How did it come to be that women are made to look like the weak ones who need protectin'? Truth is, it's men who need the protectin'. Really they do. Women have the strong thing inside of them and the can get through anything. They just can. They're used to pain of child birthing - pain no man knows - and some women being battered around and not treated right through all the centuries and having to learn at a real young age how to stay alive on the inside when the outside is being hurt real bad. Most all women know that. But men. Those poor men. They just don't have the inside strength the women do. It's harder for men to feel pain.”

“That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.”

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”