Top 87 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes
#2. Ma Baxter rocked complacently. They were all pleased whenever she made a joke. Her good nature made the same difference in the house as the hearth-fire had made in the chill of the evening.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#3. They listened with flattering attention. He was filled with enthusiasm. He began at the beginning and tried to tell it as he thought Penny would do. Half-way through, he looked down at the cake. He lost interest in the account.
"Then Pa shot him," he ended abruptly.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#5. They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#7. Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'taint easy.
--Penny Baxter to his son, Jody
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#8. A part of the placidity of the South comes from the sense of well-being that follows the heart-and-body-warming consumption of breads fresh from the oven. We serve cold baker's bread to our enemies, trusting that they will never impose on our hospitality again.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#9. It is my conviction that the personality of the writer has nothing to do with the literate product of his mind. And publicity in this case embarrasses me because I am acutely conscious of how far short the book falls of the artistry I am struggling to achieve. It's like being caught half-dressed.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#10. I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#11. Eulalie in a remote fashion belonged to him, Jody, to do with as he pleased, if only to throw potatoes at her.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#12. Life is a difficult matter, and the more a simple man may learn of what greater men have thought, and taught, have spoken and have written, the better can he cope with any sort of life.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#13. A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#15. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#16. I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#17. Now, having left cities behind me, turned
Away forever from the strange, gregarious
Huddling of men by stones, I find those various
Great towns I knew fused into one, burned
Together in the fire of my despising ...
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#18. It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned ... We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#20. You can't change a man, no-ways. By the time his mummy turns him loose and he takes up with some innocent woman and marries her, he's what he is.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#21. Yet it was . . . Asahel who knew those books secretly by heart, and read, as laboriously as he did everything else, any scrap of paper with printing on it, poring hungrily over the magic of words.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#22. Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#23. But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#24. She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#25. A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#26. Personal publicity is apt to be dangerous to any writer's integrity; for the moment he begins to fancy himself as quite a person, a taint creeps into his work.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#27. Here in Florida the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing, making no rustle in their passing.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#28. Good" is what helps us or at least does not hinder. "Evil" is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#31. Hit don't make no difference what a man perfesses. I been in a heap o' churches. There's the Nazarene Church and the Pentecost and the Holy Rollers and the Baptists and I don't know what-all. I cain't see much difference to nary one of 'em. There's a good to all of 'em and there's a bad.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#32. Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#33. Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#34. People in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#35. He wrote:
Dear ollever; yor ol twinkk has dun gode up the rivver. im gladd. yor friend jody.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#36. He set down the milk pails to rest and stared at the bright house. This was a man's great joy, to come at nightfall after his day's work to a lighted house. . . . and his beloved was waiting for him with food and warmth and comfort.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#37. A man'll seem like a person to a woman, year in, year out. She'll put up and she'll put up. Then one day he'll do something maybe no worse than what he's been a-doing all his life. She'll look at him. And without no warning he'll look like a varmint.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#38. The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#40. You do somethin' for me? Go tell Twink I'll meet her at the old grove Tuesday about dusk-dark."
Jody was frozen.
He burst out, "I won't do it. I hate her. Ol' yellow-headed somethin'.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#42. It had been so brief a sojourn, not even a full century. He had been a guest in a mansion and he was not ungrateful. He was at once exhausted and refreshed. His stay was ended. Now he must gather up the shabby impedimenta of his mind and body and be on his way again.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#44. She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water. Her pertness enchanted them. Young men went away from her with a feeling of bravado. Old men were enslaved by her silver curls. Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#46. We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#48. Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#51. She was not unattractive until she focused her eyes on a human being, when their unblinking coldness gave the effect of the stare of an adder.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#52. He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#53. Jody said, "Ma, you're shore good."
"Oh, yes. When it's rations."
"Well, I'd a heap ruther you was good about rations and mean about other things."
"Oh, I be mean, be I?"
"Only about jest a very few things," he soothed her.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#57. Good God, with a bounty
Look down on Marion County,
For the soil is so pore, and so awful rooty, too,
I don't know what to God the pore folks gonna do.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#58. It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#61. Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man's mind.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#62. This, then, was hunger. This was what his mother had meant when she had said, "We'll all go hongry." He had laughed, for he had thought he had known hunger, and it was faintly pleasant. He knew now that it had been only appetite. This was another thing.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#63. Grandma Hutto's flower garden was a bright patchwork quilt thrown down inside the pickets.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#64. I can only tell you that when long soul-searching and a combination of circumstances delivered me of my last prejudices, there was an exalted sense of liberation. It was not the Negro who became free, but I.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#65. It seemed a strange thing to him, when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines should grow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river there grew magnolias. Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mules and horses. But trees were different in different places.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#67. Two elements enter into successful and happy gatherings at table. The food, whether simple or elaborate, must be carefully prepared; willingly prepared; imaginatively prepared. And the guests - friends, family or strangers - must be conscious of their welcome.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#68. When a wave of love takes over a human being ... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#71. It occurred to him that the increasing patience of age was as great a myth as the unalloyed joy of youth. The longer he lived, the less tolerance he had for the patently evil.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#72. The worst things I knows of is rattlesnakes and some kinds o' people. And a rattlesnake minds his own matters if he ain't bothered. A man's got a right to kill ary thing, snake or man, comes messin' up with him.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#73. It's very important to be just to other people. It takes years and years of living to learn that injustice against oneself is always unimportant.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#75. Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#76. A pie so delicate, so luscious, that I hope to be propped up on my dying bed and fed a generous portion. Then I think that I should refuse outright to die, for life would be too good to relinquish.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#78. Some of the books that provided the richest fare were hidden under unrevealing names, like a rare soul behind a drab face
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#80. No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#81. Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#82. At one time or another most of us at the Creek have been suspected of a degree of madness. Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity ...
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#84. Magic birds were dancing in the mystic marsh. The grass swayed with them, and the shallow waters, and the earth fluttered under them. The earth was dancing with the cranes, and the low sun, and the wind and sky.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#86. He lay down beside the fawn. He put one arm across its neck. It did not seem to him that he could ever be lonely again.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
#87. No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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