Quotes from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

A mark was on him from the day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.

Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.

Grandma Hutto's flower garden was a bright patchwork quilt thrown down inside the pickets.

She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water. Her pertness enchanted them. Young men went away from her with a feeling of bravado. Old men were enslaved by her silver curls. Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.

I'll walk off the rest of my mad.

Life is a difficult matter, and the more a simple man may learn of what greater men have thought, and taught, have spoken and have written, the better can he cope with any sort of life.

the human heart is allus the same. Sorrer strikes the same all over. Hit makes a different kind o' mark in different places.

Eulalie in a remote fashion belonged to him, Jody, to do with as he pleased, if only to throw potatoes at her.

The moon rose in the east and that was moon-rise. Six hours later it hung at its zenith between east and west, and that was south-moon-over. It set in the west and that was moon-down. Then it passed from sight and swung under the earth, between west and east. And when it was directly under the earth, that was south-moon-under.

It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily.

He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marvelled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.

Some of the books that provided the richest fare were hidden under unrevealing names, like a rare soul behind a drab face

In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, "Flag!" It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy's voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

Now loneliness washed intolerably over her, as though she were drowning in a cold black pond.

no man was spared. What all had borne, each could bear. He shared their sorrow, and they became a part of his, and the sharing spread their grief a little, by thinning it.

Doc said, 'That's man-nature, Ma'am. Three things bring a man home again—his bed, his woman, and his dinner.

Dogs could die, and bears and deer and other people. That was acceptable, because it was remote. His father could not die. The earth might cave in under him in one vast sink-hole and he could accept it. But without Penny, there was no earth. Without him there was nothing.

Words began fights and words ended them.

Now I shore as the devil won't waste no time tootlin' him. You know me better'n that. You know I'm made outen whale-bone and hell.' 'Ain't the whalebone gittin' a mite limber?' ''Tis, but the hell's hot as ever.

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

Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

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

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

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