Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.

Obama's the most thoughtful-sounding president I can remember. He seems to be saying what he wants to say, and that is a great relief. He always sounds like he's thinking about what he's saying while he's saying it, and that's a rare thing in politicians.

Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late.

If a cat spoke, it would say things like, 'Hey, I don't see the problem here.'

People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.

Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.

I do not Twitter. I don't want to Twitter, and I don't see any point in Twittering. The last thing I want to do is tell people what I'm doing at the moment because I'm probably not doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

Certainly people have said a lot of deeply unfortunate and stupid things in Southern accents, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the accent itself.

A picture's worth a thousand words? A library card's worth millions.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

Cats have intercepted my footsteps at the ankle for so long that my gait, both at home and on tour, has been compared to that of a man wading through low surf.

In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.

Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.

Ham's substantial, ham is fat. Ham is firm and sound. Ham's what God was getting at When He made pigs so round.

Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.

The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.

A dog will make eye contact. A cat will, too, but a cat's eyes don't even look entirely warm-blooded to me, whereas a dog's eyes look human except less guarded. A dog will look at you as if to say, "What do you want me to do for you? I'll do anything for you." Whether a dog can in fact, do anything for you if you don't have sheep (I never have) is another matter. The dog is willing.

The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

I do not know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug, and someone has tracked it all over onto the other rug. I do not know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They do not seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while they are doing it. It's their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.

The first time I walked into a library, I got so excited I almost wet my pants.

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.