Dowell Quotes

Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

We've been around for a long time, Mr. Dowell. Longer than you or any of your stupid little friends could ever conceive. Sleeping in the shadows and waiting for the right moment. A disease you might call us. A plague. Evil. From beneath the ground, it rises as it has done many times in the past. ~ Jeyn Roberts

That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor. ~ Coleman Dowell

Tobin, my man, you are going to learn about chickens. And when you to learn about chickens, you will learn about life. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way.
p92 ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.'
'Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid ... Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness. ~ Coleman Dowell

I have to say, it felt good to be wanted, son. Felt real good. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

You gonna stand in my backyard and ignore me to my face? ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."
Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"
Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

When I think about everything that's happened since school started, well, I don't think the word 'normal' applies to any of it. Verbena is right - I'm way past normal. Only I've realized that when you move beyond normal, the road you're on doesn't necessarily take you to the land of the abnormal or the weird or the freakish. Instead you might find yourself in a place where people build Freedom School and have the courage to live large. It's a place where people don't worry too much when they get a little goat poop on their shoes. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

4. If you do not give your chickens enough space, light, air, and walking-around room, they will eat one another. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

Everybody's broken, sweetie. God helps us get put back together.
~Rev. Mayes
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

Don't be afraid to be different.
Different is better.
Different is much more interesting. ~ Francis O'Roark Dowell

All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of him, and this done after he is safely dead. ~ Coleman Dowell

Dream girl? Ain't such a thing. You walk, you talk, you got mammary glands, well, that's gonna do it right there for most guys. ~ Frances O'Roark Dowell

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will. ~ Coleman Dowell