"Funny thing was, I used to like Porter Dotson fine when he was just the feller down the street who ran the newspaper. He was funny and friendly. Then he married my mama two years ago, and I stopped liking him."
Chap. 2, p. 21

"I thought I was the only one in the room who detected that disguised insult to the whole female gender, but no, there was Woodrow peeping around the side of his glasses at me. He never missed a thing. And it occurred to me that Woodrow would never say anything like that. he did not think of me as "just a girl" any more than I thought of his as a cross-eyed boy."
Chap. 3, p. 30

"It was near dawn that the nightmare came. Just like the ones before it, there was an animal, limp and lifeless, in a puddle of blood. Was it a deer...