Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
A man'll seem like a person to a woman, year in, year out. She'll put up and she'll put up. Then one day he'll do something maybe no worse than what he's been a-doing all his life. She'll look at him. And without no warning he'll look like a varmint.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
You can tame a bear. You can tame a wild-cat and you can tame a panther.... You can tame anything, son, excusing the human tongue.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Two elements enter into successful and happy gatherings at table. The food, whether simple or elaborate, must be carefully prepared; willingly prepared; imaginatively prepared. And the guests — friends, family or strangers — must be conscious of their welcome.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Snow's a searchin' thing. Snow be's like sorrow. It searches people out.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Houses are individual and can be owned, like nests, and fought for. But what of the land? It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
It is my conviction that the personality of the writer has nothing to do with the literate product of his mind. And publicity in this case embarrasses me because I am acutely conscious of how far short the book falls of the artistry I am struggling to achieve. It's like being caught half-dressed.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The family ate hugely, they were like a school of voracious fish feeding under the sea of chatter.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The sound of his father's voice was a necessity. He longed for the sight of his stooped shoulders as he had never, in the sharpest of his hunger, longed for food.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Stars clustered about the chimney-top like silver bees in swarm.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Her satisfaction rose to the surface like the thick golden cream on the milk pans.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
He shared their sorrow, and they became a part of his, and the sharing spread their grief a little, by thinning it.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
It was a quieter matter, he thought, for one advanced in years; not that death comes, but that life goes.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
To comfort any mortal against loneliness, one other is enough.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings