Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?"
"How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls."
"The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it."
"Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while."
"You men,' she says. 'You durn men."
"When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again."
"He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer."
"Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own."
"I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God."
"Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed."
"So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream."
"The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper."
"Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it."
"Poor man. Poor mankind."
"'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop."
"It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was."
"Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]"
"People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind."
"Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilizing the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no."
"I will never lie again."