Quotes from Ron Rash

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that's the way of it

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way," Aunt Margaret said. "Your momma knows that." But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn't be expressed.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. Those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone… a soul which has entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle.

The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died. This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel thought, that must be what this is.

Then it became clear that it was a song, the loneliest sort of song because the notes changed so little, like one bird calling and waiting for another to answer. It was as lonely a sound as she'd ever heard.

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start.

Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled the junkyards with crushed metal. Crosses garlanded with flowers and keepsakes marked roadsides where they'd died. You could see it coming in the smirking yearbook photos they'd left behind.

One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I'm thinking is maybe it's time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or wathever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn't working.

The worst thing the nineteen sixties did to this country was introduce drugs to rednecks

I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn't something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish it otherwise.

The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren't needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn't about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been.

She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface...

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you'd eaten the same thing.

Something Rich and Strange She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.

Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.

It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. And now this brown-eyed child. Don't love it, Rachel told herself. Don't love anything that can be taken away.

The world lies all before us.

He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.

A great business investment, religion. I'll take it over government bonds anytime.