Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.

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.

Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world-or the last.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

He who tries to forget a woman, never loved her

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