Quotes from Shirley Ann Grau

One of my current pet theories is that the winter is a kind of evangelist, more subtle than Billy Graham, of course, but of the same stuff.

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every person has a ring of stories around them, a halo almost. People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls, digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and talked to me. some I've forgotten, but most I remember. And so my memory goes back before my birth

These were our monuments, the physical signs of our passing, in the color of the door, in the screw holes and the edge marks of our sign. They held the shadow of us. Our ghosts lingered at this corner.

Some people you can't comfort. You can only go along with their pretending and pretend yourself.

As I stand there in the immaculate evening I do not find it strange to be fighting an entire town, a whole county. I am alone, yes, of course I am, but I am not particularly afraid. The house was empty and lonely before—I just did not realize it—it's no worse now. I know that I shall hurt as much as I have been hurt. I shall destroy as much as I have lost.

Our children grow old and elbow us into the grave.

It's the human condition. We're all more or less looking for a place to hide.

It's like this, when you live in a place you've always lived in, where your family has always lived. You get to see things not only in space but in time too.

Once a possum was cooked in the house, people said, twenty years later you could smell it….

He wondered if she'd been waiting all these nights to come because she hadn't had a nightgown. He started to ask her. But there was something—she had her hair pinned back and she was studying her own hands—that changed his mind. She seemed small and fragile again, and for the first time in his life he wanted to hit a woman. It was the bend of the neck that did it. It was so exposed and patient.

I wonder now what it was like living for four years, not wanting to, only waiting for your hold to weaken so you could finish up and leave.

That's the way it is with me. I don't just see things as they are today. I see them as they were. I see them all around in time. And this is bad. Because it makes you think you know a place. Because it makes you think you know the people in it.

And isn't it funny, she thought, that it takes two generations to kill off a man? … First him, and then his memory. …

Well," her husband said, "seems he don't agree." Years—many years—later when he took his granddaughter for a picnic in the cemetery with a Negro gardener or two along to clean up, William Howland talked about his wife Lorena. "There was such a light to her," he said, "all over her. I used to think

They are dead, all of them. I am caught and tangled around by their doings. It is as if their lives left a weaving of invisible threads in the air of this house, of this town, of this county. And I stumbled and fell into them.

And isn't it funny, she thought, that it takes two generations to kill off a man? ... First him, and then his memory. . . .

On those pieces of paper there was just the word "Free" and a scrawl that looked like "Jack." So these new freemen and their children for all the years after were called Freejacks.

Oak trees come out of acorns, no matter how unlikely that seems. An acorn is just a tree's way back into the ground. For another try. Another trip through. One life for another.

One of my current pet theories is that the winter is a kind of evangelist, more subtle than Billy Graham, of course, but of the same stuff.