Sarah Addison Allen

“A hummingbird cake, she decided as she turned on the kitchen light. It was made with bananas and pineapples and pecans and had a cream cheese frosting.She would make it light enough to float away.She reached over to open the window. To float to her daughter.”

“You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don't like the ending, you make up a new one.”

“It was a remarkable realization to Eby, that we are what we're taught. That was why the Morris women were what they were. It was because they knew no different.”

“You'd be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you'd do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.”

“I love that my dad has stopped asking me when I'm going to get a real job.”

“...Agatha had declared that her friendship to Georgie still existed, as if it was a living, breathing thing, something that came to life the moment it happened and didn't just go away because they no longer acknowledged it.”

“To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him.”

“She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.”

“People always say life is too short for regrets. But the truth is, it's too long.”

“There was an art to the male posterior. That's all there was to it.”

“Don't be vain. What you look like doesn't matter. It's the deed that matters.”

“I know he's a good baby... but the challenge is to raise him into a good boy, then a good man.”

“He stood there, glowing like the sun, and stared at her like she was the unbelievable one.”

“At any given time I'm listening to the Cory Branan, Leonna Naess, Eve 6, the King's Noyse, Sean Paul, Green Day, the BoDeans, Buddy Holly, Nowell Sing We Clear... the list goes on and on. But I rarely listen to music while I write. I start typing the lyrics.”

“Cancer is too real, and too awful, and I can't make it good or magical. I couldn't even read a book where a character had cancer, for a while... But now I've reached a point where I don't think about cancer nonstop anymore, and sometimes I worry about that - I'm going to forget what I went through; I'm going to forget how horrible it was.”

“Magical realism is a blending of the unusual or supernatural into an otherwise ordinary setting. And, to me, this perfectly describes the South. 'The Sugar Queen' involves a lot of magical happenings, but in a very down-home Southern setting. It's full of things that could almost be true.”

“She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.”

“At the end of the evening, Paxton and Willa walked Agatha out to the nurse's car, after Agatha had given them a blind tour of the Madam, pointing out by feel and memory everything she remembered about the house. She and Georgie sliding down the banister and their skirts flying up. Playing dolls in Georgie's room. Having pineapple upside-down cake the Jacksons' cook would make in a cast-iron frying pan, so that the brown sugar on top turned crispy. A slide-away secret compartment in the bookcase where they used to leave notes for each other.”

“He claimed the waters must have, indeed, been healing, because look how hard his journey was on him to get there, and how easy it was on him to get home.”

“Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.”