This story ends in blood. Every story begins in blood: a squalling baby yanked from the womb, bathed in mucus and half a quart of their mother’s blood.
-- Narrator (Prologue)

Importance: This is the opening line of the novel. This quote is important because it sets the stage for what is to come and foreshadows mayhem that is about to unfold. It also starts the continuous thread of turning traditionally feminine things, such as childbirth, violent and gory.

She’d talked to them about her marriage, and her children, and gotten frustrated with them, and argued with them, and seen all of them cry at some point, and somewhere along the line, among all the slaughtered coeds, and shocking small-town secrets, and missing children, and true accounts of the cases that changed America forever, she’d learned two things: they were all in this together, and if their husbands ever took out...
-- Patricia ("Cry, The Beloved Country")