The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm’s bloomers and run them up...

It’s crazy isn’t it?” She shook her head. “You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don’t have to believe it, and I think it’s beautiful.” She shook her head again. “It’s crazy.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn’t want to forget… So I realize, that if it’s hard for me, how...

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ‘cept maybe tough

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

You think it’s so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain’t.

She wasn’t scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his...

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don’t have to be ashamed.

…I just gave up trying to be a Christian… Let’s face it, I ain’t got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn’t have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at...

All of us can think of a book… that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from...

…the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren’t anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren’t where you had been, and you weren’t yet where you were going. You...

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look...

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.