Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Good Daughter:
“What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it's worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.”
“Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.”
“I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.”
“I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart”
“It is a father’s job to love his daughter in the way that she needs to be loved.”
“A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial.”
“Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.”
“sometimes, your world turns upside down, and you need somebody to show you how to walk on your hands before you can find your feet again.”
“a Democrat is a Republican who’s been through the criminal justice system.”
“Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you've got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
“Every place always has somebody who doesn’t fit in. That’s what makes them fit in.”
“You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.”
“I've always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.”
“You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.”
“As hard as it was to hold on to things, it was even harder to let them go.”
“That's the problem with life, Sam. If you're not rising, you're falling.”
“People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action. And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.”
“Neither of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.”
“Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day.”
“If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.”
“Dogs are stupid,” Rusty said. “This is a known fact. But a cat—you have to earn a cat’s respect every single day of your life. You lose it and—” He snapped his fingers. “That’s what your mama was to me. She was my cat. She kept my compass pointing true north.”
“. . what you call my struggle to submit . . . is not struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest.” —FLANNERY O’CONNOR”
“all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.”
“people found off-putting. You could not beat her at chess or Trivial Pursuit or even Monopoly. She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.”
“They’ll only get your goat if you show them where you keep your hay.”
“He talked about how people always obsess about lies. Damn lies, But no one really understands that the real danger is truth.”
“Hope’ is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops–at all.”
“What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways , it's worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive....Or not, in some cases........Sounds a lot like being shot in the head.”
“Charlie watched her husband’s boss grip the sides of the podium like he was about to sodomize it.”
“She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn't sleep too much, didn't breathe too much, didn't live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.”
