Love in a Dry Season Quotes.

1. "Then too, and this was as romantic as the others, Briartree was the only thing she had ever really owned. Everything else had more or less been lent her; so it seemed. But this was hers, earned by blood, the only good she ever got from being kin to her mother."
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

2. "There was beginning to be a sense of history, made immediate by the fact that an English king had given up his throne for a woman: the woman I love, the king said and they thrilled to hear him say it, huddled about their radios as for warmth. Romance wasnt dead, they told themselves. Even in their time such things could happen—and they were on hand, almost a part of it, leaning toward the loudspeakers. Yet there was something weak and sordid about the affair: they could not help but feel this and they were vaguely dissatisfied, knowing it would not have been so in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time. Amy"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

3. "At any rate, though he never succeeded in laughing at her, as she had done (and continued to do) at him, he fulfilled at least half of what he had predicted he would do when they were married; he beat her. The trouble was, she fought back. And ably, too: for she would snatch up any weapon that was handy, a table lamp, the nail scissors, one of her sharp-heeled shoes, an open box of dusting powder, and once her rubber douche bag. With Amy thus accoutered, husband and wife were about evenly matched. This"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

4. "It’s not any fun in the dark, he said, and she saw his eyes brimming with tears that glistened in the moonlight. She really felt sorry for him—even she. For what could be more pitiful than a voyeur in the dark?"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

5. "In Paris (though he had just come four thousand miles from the river where it was born, though Bessie Smith herself had sung at a Negro dance ten miles from Briartree while they were packing for their trip abroad, and though Duff Conway, the greatest horn man of his time—for whose scratched and worn recordings Jeff was to pay as high as fifty and sixty dollars apiece—had been born and raised in Bristol, son of the cook in the Barcroft house on Lamar Street) Jeff discovered jazz. He fell among the cultists, the essayists on the ‘new’ American rhythms, including the one of whom Eddie Condon, when asked for an opinion, later said, Would I go over there and tell him how to jump on a grape?"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

6. "Back home the election was over; the country had a new president: ‘Mr Roosevelt’ he was called at first, then ‘Roosevelt,’ then ‘that Roosevelt,’ and finally just ‘he’ or ‘him’ by mouths that twisted bitterly on the pronoun, for the westering boats were crowded with expatriates—A traitor to his class, they said."
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

7. "So their relationship entered a new phase, characterized by enmity round the clock. True, they had fought all along—there had been the gladiatorial contests in which she would snatch up any handy weapon to even the odds. But that sort of combat was almost a sporting thing: it seemed the natural way to close their arguments, just as war is said to be an extension of politics, statecraft."
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

8. "Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair. Jeff"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

9. "But as they walked home together through the leaf-plastered streets, under that eerie refulgence, her father seemed to have divined her plans. This was in his manner, not his words: they were halfway home before he spoke. Amanda, he said. He paused. I want you to realize the consequences before you do something youll be sorry for. He did not look at her, and she too kept her eyes to the front. You know that when I say a thing I mean it—I mean it to the hilt. So tell your young man this, Amanda. Tell him that the day you marry without my consent I’ll cut you off without a dime. Without so much as one thin dime, Amanda. I’ll cut you off, disown you, and what is more I’ll never regret it. I’ll never so much as think your name again. Up to now he had spoken slowly, pausing between phrases. But now the words came fast, like fencing thrusts. Tell your young man that, Amanda, and see what he says. Major"
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season

10. "Jeff and Amy were part of this, though never in the sense that the natives were. They were not indigenous: they were outlanders, ‘foreigners,’ distinguished by a sort of upcountry cosmopolitan glaze which permitted them to mingle but not merge. Even their drinking habits set them apart. Deltans drank only corn and Coca-Cola; gin was perfume, scotch had a burnt-stick taste. They would watch with wry expressions while Amy blended her weird concoctions, pink ladies and Collinses and whiskey sours, and those who tried one, finally persuaded, would sip and shudder and set the glass aside: Thanks—mildly outraged, smirking—I’ll stick to burrbon."
- Shelby Foote, Love in a Dry Season