Michael McDowell Quotes

To have a family is real strange," said India thoughtfully. "All these people you wouldn't have anything to do with except that they're related to you.

They placed the board between them on the kitchen table, and Becca took the suddenly inspired precaution of sprinkling the planchette with holy water taken from a bottle in the pantry placed next to the vanilla extract.

Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.

And among adults, adultery is an unmentionable thing, which only occurs in the Bible and in Mobile.

I am a commercial writer and I'm proud of that. I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.

All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.

That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment-these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.

She had got beyond despair.

Grace began to understand. "I have friends," she protested. "I have Zaddie."

"Zaddie is just a little colored girl," Mary-Love pointed out. "It's all right to play with Zaddie, but she's not your real friend. John Robert can be your real little friend.

To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut.

In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.

No mother and daughter in Perdido were closer than Mary Love Caskey and Sister. But it was not to be supposed that either told the other everything she thought or knew. In fact, each of them liked to keep little secrets from the other. Secrets which could be sprung at some opportune moment to produce a grand effect, rather in the manner of a little boy tossing lighted firecrackers beneath his sister's bed while she napped on a hot summer afternoon.

You know what you should have done, added Luker, you should have ripped his balls off and stapled them to the back of his throat.

Merle Weaver stroked the little girl's hair and thought of the two corpses in the rear of the truck.

Alcoholism is a disease," she said. "Like athlete's foot. Or herpes. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Luker and I have lots of friends who are alcoholics. And speed freaks too." "Well,

I sort of wish that was what happened though, Ginny, because that would mean the girl is all right. Fourteen-year-old girls have run off before."

Ginny eyed the sheriff severely. "Not fourteen-year-old girls who had grandmas like Evelyn Larkin.