Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

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.

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

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn't

It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.

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.

Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.

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.

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.

A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.

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.

Life is strong stuff, some of us can bear more of it than others.

You kin tame a bear. You kin tame a wild-cat and you kin tame a panther. ... You kin tame arything, son, excusin' the human tongue.

The best fish in the world are of course those one catches oneself.

Information can be passed from one to another, like a silver dollar. There's absolutely no wisdom except what you learn for yourself.

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.

For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and unfed since childhood days. I am often lonely. Who is not? But I should be lonelier in the heart of a city.

Living was no longer the grief behind him, but the anxiety ahead.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

He who tries to forget a woman, never loved her

Words began fights and words ended them.

Here in Florida the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing, making no rustle in their passing.

to comfort any mortal against loneliness, one other is enough.

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.

It is not that death comes, but that life leaves.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.

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.

people in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.

Garlic, like perfume, must be used with discretion and on the proper occasions.

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.

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.

I had done battle with a great fear and the victory was mine.

The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge.

no case of libel by a negro against a white would even reach a southern court.

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.

the truth is artistically fallacious.

It is not death that kills us, but life. We are done to death by life.

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.

A woman has to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

Grandma Hutto’s flower garden was a bright patchwork quilt thrown down inside the pickets.

I'm eating' it quick... but I'll remember it a long time.

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.