Tom Franklin Quotes

Coming back like this to hunt for details for my stories feels a bit like poaching on land that used to be mine. But I've never lost the need to tell of my Alabama, to reveal it, lush and green and full of death. So I return, knowing what I've learned.

Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream.

On the other end of the porch the swing creaked pleasantly on its chains. This was the time of home-night he enjoyed, when his wife was inside asleep and he, at last, was alone. Time of year he enjoyed, too, the kind of peaceable weather you needed sleeves for but not a coat, chill in the air to make your scalp tingle but not set you to shivering.

Baseball," he said. "Babe Ruth." Dixie Clay saw now that the boy wore a satchel honeycombed with rolled newspapers. The world was still going on, was it.

Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.

But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.

Daylight crept through the trees like an army of crafty boys.

He was tired of having only three channels.

He buys Playboy magazines and looks through them once, then gives them to me. That's what it's like to be rich.
Here's what it's like to be poor. Your wife leaves you because you can't find a job because there aren't any jobs to find. You empty the jar of pennies on the mantel to buy cigarettes. You hate to answer the phone; it can't possibly be good news. When your friends invite you out, you don't go. After a while, they stop inviting. You owe them money, and sometimes they ask for it. You tell them you'll see what you can scrape up.
Which is this: nothing.

He found the first skipped meals were the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn't know how hungry you were, how empty you'd become. Wallace's visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it.

You can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another.

Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook."
But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life.

never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.

Dawn crept up out of the trees, defining a bole, a burl, a leaf at a time the world he'd spent the night trying to comprehend. But what would daylight offer except the illusion of understanding? At least in darkness you were spared the pretending.

She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood.

they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain't we.

I realized how lucky I was to have been raised here in these southern woods among poachers and storytellers.

field beyond field beyond field of well-kept cotton, each tuft white as a senator's eyebrow.

What damn fool punches his own horse?

all monsters were misunderstood.

He was the kind of man who grew better looking the longer you knew him. Whereas Jesse began to tarnish the moment you took him off the shelf.

Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith. This is the one most closely associated with the 1927 flood,

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?"
"Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted."
"Roy's a loan shark, too?"
"You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked.
Glen said he had.
"How 'bout THE GODFATHER?"
"Yeah."
"Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy."
from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES

the writing process behind The Tilted World.

Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did.

the south where these stories take place - is lower Alabama, lush and green and full of death, the wooded counties between the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers.

Smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.

He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Later he says, "Listen here, you men, / one more thing I'd like to say / Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away.

The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people.

Who wouldn't admire the gall of a fellow brings a machine gun and a peck of hired killers to his own goddamn trial? Who wouldn't admire a fellow never leaves a trail of evidence? That's got this far in the world and galled so many folks and killed twice that number and cheated the rest, all without being blowed to itty bitty pieces or hanged by his goddamn neck or succumbing to one of countless infirmities he seems to collect like a goddamn hobby, hell yeah I admire the son-of-a-bitch.

The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.

Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.

Where's that tree?" Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. "Is the rope still there?" Glancing at him, his father said, "Naw." "What happened to it?" "They cut it down. Mill did." He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. "Enjoyed it," he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den.

At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was.