I come from an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories.
-- Narrator (River of Names paragraph 2)

Importance: This quote from "River of Names" speaks to the story itself: the narrator aims to tell the stories of her cousins, but even the stories she tells are fraught with anguish and death. The narrator has many cousins, too many to remember or count. Still, in the story itself, she recounts the stories of the cousins she can remember; most of their lives ended in tragedy. This quote indicates, however, that she can't tell all of her cousins stories because she can't remember all of them.

She's trash. She's nothing but trash, and you know it.
-- Shirley (Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee paragraph 6)

Importance: A direct reference to the title of this story collection, trash refers to a lower-class person who in the speaker's estimation does not have much value in life. These sentences are spoken by Shirley about her daughter Mattie, who, in Shirley's...