The Bean Trees Quotes

Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than the Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you co...

Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and splitting our gussets laughing about homeostasis and bean turds. We had already established that our hometowns in Kentuc...

Surprisingly, Angel had agreed to move back in until after her mother and grandmother's visit. He might be hard to talk to and unreasonable in every other way but at least, Lou Ann realized, he kne...

It was the second day of the new year. I had stayed on at the Broken Arrow through most of the holidays, earning some money changing beds. The older woman with the shakes, whose name was Mrs. Hoge,...

I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the ba...

The Indian child was a girl. A girl, poor thing. That fact had already burdened her life with a kind of misery I could not imagine. I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to a...

Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew. It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event. Believe me in those days the girls were...

I had looked at some maps, but since I had never in my own memory been outside of Kentucky [...], I had no way of knowing why or how any particular place might be preferable to any other. That is,...