Tom Franklin Quotes

#1. they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain't we.

Tom Franklin

#2. never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.

Tom Franklin

#3. all monsters were misunderstood.

Tom Franklin

#4. Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.

Tom Franklin

#5. Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream.

Tom Franklin

#6. Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did.

Tom Franklin

#7. The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.

Tom Franklin

#8. The visit hadn't lasted much longer, and Wallace never said what he'd done, but after Larry watched him go, he'd spent the rest of the night on his porch as daylight crept through the trees like am army of crafty boys.

Tom Franklin

#9. She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood.

Tom Franklin

#10. Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith. This is the one most closely associated with the 1927 flood,

Tom Franklin

#11. Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.

Tom Franklin

#12. Smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.

Tom Franklin

#13. Down Hearted Blues, by Bessie Smith. This is the song Ingersoll is singing to the baby

Tom Franklin

#14. Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?

Tom Franklin

#15. Baseball," he said. "Babe Ruth." Dixie Clay saw now that the boy wore a satchel honeycombed with rolled newspapers. The world was still going on, was it.

Tom Franklin

#16. Daylight crept through the trees like an army of crafty boys.

Tom Franklin

#17. He was the kind of man who grew better looking the longer you knew him. Whereas Jesse began to tarnish the moment you took him off the shelf.

Tom Franklin

#18. Back water done rose at Sumner," sings Patton, "drove poor Charlie down, down the line.

Tom Franklin

#19. the writing process behind The Tilted World.

Tom Franklin

#20. In the divorce my ex got everything. Even kept her composure.

Tom Franklin

#21. But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.

Tom Franklin

#22. He was tired of having only three channels.

Tom Franklin

#23. I realized how lucky I was to have been raised here in these southern woods among poachers and storytellers.

Tom Franklin

#24. Coming back like this to hunt for details for my stories feels a bit like poaching on land that used to be mine. But I've never lost the need to tell of my Alabama, to reveal it, lush and green and full of death. So I return, knowing what I've learned.

Tom Franklin

#25. Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn't be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living.

Tom Franklin

#26. The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people.

Tom Franklin

#27. High Water Everywhere" by Charlie Patton. If you have a hard time making out the lyrics, you're not alone - even Son House (who, along with Howlin' Wolf, was influenced by Patton)

Tom Franklin

#28. Dawn crept up out of the trees, defining a bole, a burl, a leaf at a time the world he'd spent the night trying to comprehend. But what would daylight offer except the illusion of understanding? At least in darkness you were spared the pretending.

Tom Franklin

#29. What damn fool punches his own horse?

Tom Franklin

#30. He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Later he says, "Listen here, you men, / one more thing I'd like to say / Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away.

Tom Franklin

#31. Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook."
But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life.

Tom Franklin

#32. the south where these stories take place - is lower Alabama, lush and green and full of death, the wooded counties between the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers.

Tom Franklin

#33. field beyond field beyond field of well-kept cotton, each tuft white as a senator's eyebrow.

Tom Franklin