Quotes from Ellen Gilchrist

My childhood is in my brother's house, and I like to visit there and be reminded.

The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then.

Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.

My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends.

I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer.

All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.

That's great," Katie said. "Actually, it's revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time, you're the first woman I ever knew that could. Maybe you're the missing link, Amanda." Maybe you ought to get a job for the 'Ladies Home Journal.' They like simplistic shit like that.

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.

???: ?? ?? ???? ???? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ? ?? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???? ?? …!! (????? ???????) All you have to do to educate a child is leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest is brainwashing.

I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.

Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way.

Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape

Once a man I was leaving told me I could go if I would leave my skin behind. I was so young I didn't even know that I was wonderful..

We live at the level of our language.

She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway.

We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. -Mexico

It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.

Maybe I only think everyone wants to be a writer because the friends I naturally choose are people who love books. People who love books sooner or later dream of writing them. It's a natural response to stimuli.

The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace.

By the time the class ended I was back into an optimistic mood about their work. They were learning, they were working, it takes time, the muse will come if she is summoned.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

What he could not see was how the weak destroy the strong within a family as well as in larger worlds. This happens in every family. It is as inevitable as the sun and rain. All the daughter wanted to know was how to keep it from happening to her.

I'm not interesting. I'm a cliché inside a self-fulfilling prophecy inside a stereotype. I just let it happen. I don't fight it. I'm too busy being alive.

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.