Quotes from Daniel Woodrell

My father was a salesman, and I always said I wouldn't be one.

I tell the story by feel most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own.

I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.

I had gone to enlist in the Navy, but they had a long waiting list and no need for high-school dropouts.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?' 'Kill me, I guess.' 'That idea has been said already. Got'ny other ones?' 'Help me. Ain't nobody said that idea yet, have they?

babies don't know anything but nipples and lullabies. they splash out looks of wonder on anybody whether they merit it or not.

Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you've had sex with. A person you've licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.

He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles.

Your palms break sweat and you sit there, needy, while your work ethic and character are available for comment from strangers you wouldn't share a joint with at a blues festival.

The bodies draped down through the leaves like rancid baubles in the locks of a horrible harlot.

Ree followed a path made by prey uphill through scrub, across a bald knob and downhill into a section of pine trees and pine scent and that pious shade and silence pines create. Pine trees in low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

Moons of ache glowed in spaces of her meat and when she moved the moons banged together and stunned.

She took him to places inside a shaded room that he'd only dimly imagined might exist, and while there in sweaty reality he reclined like a pasha of lust, a man lost to squirts, sighs, fresh angles of entry and the enveloping stink, and to find this carnal enchantment for the first time at his age was to welcome a streaking of madness into his life—madness he prayed had no end now that it had begun.

So much death and no coffee to be had.

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

The World Ain't No Day-care Center.

Honesty can siphon off a few regrets and resentments if you tap in to it. Let that sink in.

Ree needed often to inject herself with pleasant sounds, stab those sounds past the constant screeching, squalling hubbub regular life raised inside her spirit, poke the soothing sounds past that racket and down deep where her jittering soul paced on a stone slab in a gray room, agitated and endlessly provoked but yearning to hear something that might bring a moment's rest.

A person has to show some spirit -- fate just about never shines on chickenshits.

boys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits, Shocking us would have required some kind of genius. Woe To Live On

Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she'd clogged with peanuts and called a late lunch.

I ain't shit! I ain't shit! shouts your brain, and this place proves the point.

I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won't say I rested.