Quotes from Barry Hannah

I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they're doing.

I got no idea wht a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't miss a single one of them. He is a peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now.

Ring! he shrieked at the vapid instrument.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

it's always your first attempt every time you write, with your only companions being fear and coffee. That's the way it is a lot of times. You have fear and coffee, and that's it.

she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near.

Whoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it.

Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human.

nightly rolling of Mother Ocean (It's all right, it's all right; everything is calm; we are just eating every thing that moves in here, dry people)...p.57

When you read and wonder, for six seconds, about the random pointless violence of these days, then are blissful it was not you, having, really, a better day, stop and think: Could not these felons be, really, God's children loose, adept, so hungry and correct in our world?

It came to him, the very picture: he was unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut. Chances seemed in a loud hurry around him, but he could do nothing--nothing-- about them. Mestre yearned to be driven by some grand circumstance. Everything in his existence was too slack.

It came to him, the very picture: he was an unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut. Chances seemed in a loud hurry around him, but he could do nothing--nothing-- about them. Mestre yearned to be driven by some grand circumstance. Everything in his existence was too slack

A man has to sleep with as many animals as possible, Ulrich blurted. But not in the sexual way. By no means. An execration. No. Just get in the bed there with them, invite them on in, know their smell and their cold nose. You smell the good dirt in their fur. Fur is individual. No two alike, like a snowflake. It ought to be a state law. The others listened, but he was through and at peace.

What he was was pretty near invisible, except for the bell of his horn, the all-but-closed eyes, the Arabian nose, the brown hair with its halo of white ends, the desperate oralness, the giant reed punched into his face, and hazy Quadberry, loving the wound in a private dignified ecstasy.

In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista.

He sifted into Elaine's, drunk, Southern and insulting, but was ignored.

I am a dragon. America the beautiful, like you will never know.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media. Certainly no rush to grow up. We had plenty of boyhood, plenty of girlhood.

My dad read history, about a book a day, but only after he retired as a successful bank and insurance man.