Quotes from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.

The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.

It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited.

It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. ... We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.

Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man's mind.

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge.

A part of the placidity of the South comes from the sense of well-being that follows the heart-and-body-warming consumption of breads fresh from the oven. We serve cold baker's bread to our enemies, trusting that they will never impose on our hospitality again.

I can only tell you that when long soul-searching and a combination of circumstances delivered me of my last prejudices, there was an exalted sense of liberation. It was not the Negro who became free, but I.

Life is strong stuff, some of us can bear more of it than others.

It is not death that kills us, but life. We are done to death by life.

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.

Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

It is not that death comes, but that life leaves.

You can't change a man, no-ways. By the time his mummy turns him loose and he takes up with some innocent woman and marries her, he's what he is.

When a wave of love takes over a human being... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.

A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.

A woman has to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

We need above all, I think, a certain remoteness from urban confusion.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

Personal publicity is apt to be dangerous to any writer's integrity; for the moment he begins to fancy himself as quite a person, a taint creeps into his work.