Quotes from Reynolds Price

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

What I still ask for daily - for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us.

Almost all of my really good times have been silent but have had to end.

Every other way is like that -- him waiting for something to happen to him, daring somebody to do something nice such as come up and touch him just so he could say, 'Why in the world did you do that?' and hold on tight till whoever bothered him vanished -- and nothing about him since has ever surprised me.

Women then very seldom wore watches. They did their chores till the chores were finished or they fell over dead, whichever came first.

In the next long minute, he felt an understanding spread deep down inside him, an understanding that he'd only felt with animals before--with poor old Hilda and the hawks he'd seen in tall bare trees and that buck deer, long ago in the woods, that spoke Ben's name and told him the world was a fine place to live, hard but fine.

In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago--burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives; then confronted in words by the flaming demands of a recently dead, maybe resurrected Jew named Jesus with a ravenous will to change us and the Earth.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn't trade my life for the world.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.