Quotes from Ron Rash

Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.

I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive. (83)

A small profit it better than a big loss

Maybe calling it being hitched ain't the prettiest way to say you're married, but it's the truth to my mind and true in a good way, because you're working together and depending on each other, and you're sharing the load.

You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender's sole advantage.

Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

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

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.

Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance.

A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.

She'd never known fear had a taste, but it did.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.'

I wouldn't mind being a track and field coach.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

'Cool-Hand Luke' is one of my favorite movies.