Brenda Sutton Rose Quotes

Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.

A part of him died slowly, and the other part died overnight

These babies ain't just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.

I seek him in the landscape of home, in the breeze brushing over rows of crops. I seek him in the seasons of planting and harvesting. A rugged man of the earth, he breathed life into this farm.

With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze.

My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn't look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name

Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it's yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey.

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

I write books with words. Numerous words. Words that stomp and stare and crush and collapse and boogie and bang and scream and laugh and manipulate. My books are a storehouse of words that form paragraphs that form chapters that form stories that form thoughts that live on long after you've read the last word.

The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults.

This land pulses with life. It breathes in me; it breathes around me; it breathes in spite of me. When I walk on this land, I am walking on the heartbeat of the past and the future. And that's only one of the reasons I am a farmer.

Sometimes we need to be knocked down so we can experience the getting up.

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.

No matter where I go, I'll never forget home. I can feel its heartbeat a thousand miles away. Home is the place where I grew my wings.

There are parents who use their small children as weapons. They are weak people. Sick people. And their children are watching them, watching how Mom and Dad use them as weapons.

The wind whirls and whistles and strip pink blooms from the mimosas, scatters twigs, broken limbs, pine needles and pine cones across our yard, and robs the pecan trees of a thousand leaves. The storm eventually dies, but the bruised trees continue to weep into the night, still shimmering with dewy leaves when the sun comes up the next morning.

Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.

As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face leathered, and his heart throbbed with music.

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they've ever known.

We don't plant trees like we used to. A yard without trees is a yard without a future. It might as well be a cemetery.

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.

Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if is the truth as long as it really happened.

If he could do one thing, he could run. He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back.

Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.

When I was a young, fireflies were as magical to me as a rare southern snow, newborn puppies, and a full moon. Back then, fireflies came in masses, filling the nearby brush and woods with the golden-green glow of something elusive and mysterious.

There's secrets hiding inside this six-string just waitin' for somebody to find 'em and turn 'em into music.

When his wounds cut too deep for the blues--when he couldn't sing himself out of his own sorrow--when he was too wounded to shimmy his fingers over piano keys--he came to the healing waters of the Alapaha River. And on the river he recounted his sins, confessing to the ancient rhythmic flow of the current. Communion.

By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised.

My mother is still warm.

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.

I'm not made for city streets. My brogans drop soil from the field behind me, each grain of dirt like a seed revealing who I am. My heart belongs in the country. I'm a farmer, and I was shaped in the fields.