Ron Rash Quotes

A small profit is better than a big loss.

John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

Don't love anything that can be taken away.

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that's the way of it

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

I wouldn't mind being a track and field coach.

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for Serena.

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity. . . . Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

Cool-Hand Luke' is one of my favorite movies.

It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)