Quotes from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

The best fish in the world are of course those one catches oneself.

Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.

It had been so brief a sojourn, not even a full century. He had been a guest in a mansion and he was not ungrateful. He was at once exhausted and refreshed. His stay was ended. Now he must gather up the shabby impedimenta of his mind and body and be on his way again.

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

Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world—or the last.

He edged closer to his father's bones and sinews. Penny slipped an arm around him and he lay close against the lank thigh. His father was the core of safety. His father swam the swift creek to fetch back his wounded dog. The clearing was safe, and his father fought for it, and for his own. A sense of snugness came over him and he dropped asleep.

You know what I wisht I had, Ma? A pouch like a 'possum, to tote things. --The Yearling

She was not unattractive until she focused her eyes on a human being, when their unblinking coldness gave the effect of the stare of an adder.

Jody said, "Ma, you're shore good." "Oh, yes. When it's rations." "Well, I'd a heap ruther you was good about rations and mean about other things." "Oh, I be mean, be I?" "Only about jest a very few things," he soothed her.

He wrote: Dear ollever; yor ol twinkk has dun gode up the rivver. im gladd. yor friend jody.

You do somethin' for me? Go tell Twink I'll meet her at the old grove Tuesday about dusk-dark." Jody was frozen. He burst out, "I won't do it. I hate her. Ol' yellow-headed somethin'.

Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'taint easy. --Penny Baxter to his son, Jody

Don't go gittin faintified on me.

At one time or another most of us at the Creek have been suspected of a degree of madness. Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity ...

He had perhaps been bruised too often. The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence. Something in him was raw and tender. The touch of men was hurtful upon it, but the touch of pines was healing.

Penny's bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more that his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood. And if, on a soft day in April, the boy had prowled away on his boy's business, he could understand the thing that had drawn him. He understood, too, its briefness.

Well, son, you cain't go thru life chunkin' things at all the ugly women you meet.

Good God, with a bounty Look down on Marion County, For the soil is so pore, and so awful rooty, too, I don't know what to God the pore folks gonna do.

His father had never planted an orchard. No growing thing was graceless, but that scowling, snarling man, Hiram Linden, had seemed purposely to avoid all crops that flowered in beauty. All were utilitarian, sown with surliness and harvested with oaths. Ase was the first Linden of three generations to consider the earth and its bounty with reverence and affection, to long to adorn it as best he might during his tenure.

He set down the milk pails to rest and stared at the bright house. This was a man's great joy, to come at nightfall after his day's work to a lighted house. . . . and his beloved was waiting for him with food and warmth and comfort.

Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin

Perhaps all men were moved against their will. A man ordered his life, and then an obscurity of circumstance sent him down a road that was not of his own desire or choosing. Something beyond a man's immediate choice and will reached through the earth and stirred him. He did not see how any man might escape it.

Hit don't make no difference what a man perfesses. I been in a heap o' churches. There's the Nazarene Church and the Pentecost and the Holy Rollers and the Baptists and I don't know what-all. I cain't see much difference to nary one of 'em. There's a good to all of 'em and there's a bad.