Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image."
"A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning."
"A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast."
"Caddy smelled like trees."
"Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible."
"ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth."
"And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless."
"The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use."
"Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets."
"It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister."
"She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words."
"...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all; and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'"
"A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it."
"Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."
"Did you ever have a sister? did you?"
"When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow."
"I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself."
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art."
"It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right."
"We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!"