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Coffee (K.D.) Smith
Billie Delia Cato is the rebellious daughter of Pat Best and the friend of Arnette Fleetwood. As a toddler, she took off her underwear in public; ever since, she has had a reputation as wild and promiscuous, despite still being a virgin. Her own mother believes these rumors, and the two have a strained relationship that occasionally devolves into violence. To escape from her mother, Billie Delia briefly stays at the Convent. She later moves to a neighboring town and works at a hospital, where she meets Pallas and sends her to the Convent. She hates Ruby, and at the end of the story she believes the Convent women will one day return and destroy the “prison calling itself a town.”
Billie Delia Cato Quotes in Paradise
The Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Billie Delia Cato or refer to Billie Delia Cato. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Divine
Quotes
[Arnette] believed she loved [K.D] absolutely because he was all she knew about her self––which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him. Except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Patricia
Quotes
She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. […] Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. […] But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.
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Billie Delia Cato Quotes in Paradise
The Paradise quotes below are all either spoken by Billie Delia Cato or refer to Billie Delia Cato. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Divine
Quotes
[Arnette] believed she loved [K.D] absolutely because he was all she knew about her self––which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him. Except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Patricia
Quotes
She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. […] Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. […] But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.
