Reynolds Price
Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.Collection: Lice
A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.Collection: Home
Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combedCollection: Hair
The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.Collection: Tornadoes
The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.Collection: Sound
What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.Collection: Life
Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.Collection: Sunrise
Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.Collection: Hurt
Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.Collection: Heart
From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.Collection: Artist
Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.Collection: Civilization
Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.Collection: Healing
The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.Collection: Art
You have to realize that your work is done by your body, and if your body is in very bad health, it's not going to work for you no matter how young you are. So, I'm a bit of an athletic coach when it comes to trying to respect my body's needs and tendencies, and when I teach students, I try and persuade them of the same.Collection: Athletic
Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of womenCollection: Children
As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.Collection: Mother
I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.Collection: Thinking
I've met little meanness, wherever I went.Collection: Littles
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.Collection: Reading