Gerri Watson > Gerri's Quotes

“He opened the door wearing an oversized wife-beater and dirty trunks to match. Funny, but he recognized me withouta struggle. Immediately, I assumed he was sober, which was a good thing. Yet, seeing me wasn’t expected or desired. For sure, I was the last person on his list of surprises. Jerry adjusted his head and sharpened his bloodshot eyes. It wasthen his booze-bated breath greeted me well before he did. Ok, he was in a stupor or maybe on the rebound. Next, soiled diapers stole the little oxygen I had left—and I was still OUTDOORS.
Yet somehow, I mustered enough wind to greet my brother. I tried to beat him to the punch and said, “What’s up bruh?” What happened next stomped my soul me for years to come! He never bothered to truly acknowledge me. Yet, heresponded without hesitation, “You know I can’t have

any company!” Then he violently slammed the door shut! Jerry was gone! I couldn’t differentiate
from being stupid or dumbstruck. I just stood silent on his porch all alone for about five minutes. I’d dealt with Jerry’s nastiness many times before. But he would initially warm up before dropping his hammer. Without a doubt, l was lost, confused, and bewildered like a teen-age boy losing a prom date. Foolishly, I used logic to dissect my embarrassment.
First, the guy scolded me as if I should’ve known better! To be fair, Jerry was the breadwinner. His wife left him years ago. That part I understood. Only a fool would have hung around his crazy ass. It was amazing they got together, let alone stayed that way long enough to create those children. Yet, all his kids were pushing the ages of twenty andabove. What the hell did he mean, “I can’t receive any company!” Of course, I heard those crying babies which madehim a granddaddy. That was strangely obvious to his existence. Yes, the cycle continues!
Second, I really didn’t care to go inside. I didn’t want to be in his business. I just wanted his input on Aunt Kathy’s memorial.”
― Harold Phifer, My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift

“I remember Peyton [Manning] called me as soon as I got out to Denver. He started the conversation by asking me, ‘When did you get in?’ We mainly just talked to get familiar with each other.”
― Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond

“Then Raya saw Rebecca West, the fourteen-year-old who only saved her own life by testifying against her mother, and then she saw her own face reflected in these girls – a swirl of chance, and life and sorrow.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“That noise you are hearing, drowning out
the blows of life, is the wind touching the fronds of the thirty or so eighty-foot-tall palm trees encircling the centrally located swimming pool. You have fun thinking this sound might be the Holy Spirit.”
― Tom Hillman, Digging for God

“The Black Prince is entombed at Canterbury Cathedral. His effigy reads: “Such as thou art, sometimes was I, Such as I am, such thou shalt be, I thought little on hour of death, So long as I enjoyed breath, On earth I had great riches, Land, houses, great treasure, Horses money and gold, But now a wretched captive am I, Deep in the ground, lo I lie, My beauty great, is all quite gone, My flesh is wasted to the bone.”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“Always move forward. Don’t dwell on the if-onlys.”
― Murray Bailey, The Prisoner of Acre

“We need to embrace deliverance in the body of Christ so that God’s people can receive their full inheritance and be free from the chains of the devil.”
― Kathryn Krick, Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression

“It was Sunday evening when it finally stopped raining. He and his dad went into the forest, and it was super wet. There were pools of water everywhere. And sure enough, the stream had jumped its banks. It looked like a torrent because it was running so fast. Joey had never seen the stream like that.”
― Ellen J. Lewinberg, Joey and His Friend Water

“So let me get this straight. You left this ‘fabulous job’ as you put it, so you could be a dog-sitter in Fort Langley?”
― Alyssa Hall, And Then I Heard the Quiet

“Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that “a small group of committed individuals” could do it. He liked to say of PIH, “People think we’re unrealistic. They don’t know we’re crazy.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. I am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others, and that without the benefit of such enthusiasm I would still be ignorant of many of the books and much of the music I love most... But rather than an expansion, I've always felt a diminishment of my own pleasure when I've invited someone else to take part in it, a rupture in the intimacy I felt with the work, an invasion of privacy. It is worst when someone else picks up the copy of a book I've just been enthralled by and begins casually to thumb through the pages.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“And Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning all sleepy and crumple-faced. Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading with her hair hanging over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed. Clare’s low voice is in my ear often.
I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“I've never seen or touched anything."
"Can you explain then how you had children?"
"You're right. It's true I have four kids. Four! But still I have never seen the male organ. He came into the bedroom, he turned off the light, and then Bam! Bam! Bam! and voila I was pregnant! What's more, I was granted four girls. So I have never seen penises.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Embroideries

“How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books