Tom Franklin > Quotes

“Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Hell at the Breech

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“all monsters were misunderstood.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“...in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves...”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“He was tired of having only three channels.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Poachers: Stories

“Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“What damn fool punches his own horse?”
― Tom Franklin, Hell at the Breech

“The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream.”
― Tom Franklin, 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. Maybe, after all this time, he'd started to believe their version of him.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain’t we.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Larry felt a strange forgiveness for him because all monsters were misunderstood.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“Bad cotton country meant good moonshining country.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“You can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“interviewing that people said he could make a stump confess to saying “timber.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother's wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like soft bone on wire; he'd always thought the chime sounded like a skeleton playing a guitar, and for a time they sat together on the porch and watched the sun scald the sky red and the trees black.”
― Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The gun was like his guitar: a thing that had power because of the hole in the middle. Maybe like Ingersoll, too, for that matter.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“My baby. My baby. She loved to call him Willy, but others could also call him Willy. Only she could say, My baby. But as much as he was her baby then, he was more so now, after the vigil on her knees, after the curses and after the prayers, after the weeping and after the begging, after going into the deepest blackest place.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World

“When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie wrote this with her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy; it was later covered by Led Zepplin.”
― Tom Franklin, The Tilted World