Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

He had the Gaelic gaiety and melancholy, like the streaks of fat and lean in Irish bacon.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
We do not desecrate the dish by serving any other, neither salad nor dessert. We just eat crab Newburg. My friends rise from the table, wring my hand with deep feeling, and slip quietly and reverently away. I sit alone and weep for the misery of a world that does not have blue crabs and a Jersey cow.

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

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

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

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Cast iron is so superior for cooking utensils to our modern aluminum that I not only cannot grieve for the pioneer hardship of cooking in iron over the hearth, but shall retire if necessary to the back yard with my two Dutch ovens, turning over all my aluminum cookers for airplanes with a secret delight.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
It seemed to him that friends were part of the indestructible tapestry of one's life, that no matter if a thread disappeared there, it would eventually reappear here, or in some other place in the design, as long as it was a thread that mattered.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Nothing would have satisfied Amelia but complete possession of her son, to all intents and purposes returning him to the dark slyness of her womb.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
He was the delight of fine cooks, who took his absent-minded capacity for appreciation.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The sun lay like a friendly arm across her square shoulders.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
People in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
A mark was on him from the day's delight, so that all his life, when April was a thin green and the flavor of rain was on his tongue, an old wound would throb and a nostalgia would fill him for something he could not quite remember.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
No case of libel by a negro against a white would even reach a southern court.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Their thoughts moved brightly toward each other, like fireflies in the darkness.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings