the truth is artistically fallacious.

Words began fights and words ended them.

Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.

He who tries to forget a woman, never loved her

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

the inferred is always more effective than the obvious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need above all, I think, a certain remoteness from urban confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

...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.

Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.

I can only tell you that when long soul-searching and a combination of circumstances delivered me of my last prejudices, there was an exalted sense of liberation. It was not the Negro who became free, but I.

Magic birds were dancing in the mystic marsh. The grass swayed with them, and the shallow waters, and the earth fluttered under them. The earth was dancing with the cranes, and the low sun, and the wind and sky.

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.

Share This Page