Shirley Abbott Quotes

Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz is magazine editor and writer, most noted for her three volumes of memoirs. Wikipedia

✵ 1934

Shirley Abbott: 6 quotes 0 likes

Famous Shirley Abbott Quotes

“People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal.”

Shirley Abbott

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 164

“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”

Shirley Abbott

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 1 (opening lines)

“If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.”

Shirley Abbott

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 45

“Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered.”

Shirley Abbott

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 3

“The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past.”

Shirley Abbott

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 210

“All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”

Shirley Abbott

Quoted in Mickey Pearlman, Listen to Their Voices (1993), ch. 12