Davis Grubb > Quotes

“It's a hard world for little things.”
― Davis Grubb

“Not that you mind the killings! There's plenty of killings in your book, Lord..”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“Hing hang hung! the words rang faintly through his daydream like echoes of Miz Cunningham's tart little doorbell. Then he looked again at the old woman herself. Why, she was really quite wonderful - this old fat woman! In the end, she got her hands on nearly everything in the world! Just look at her window! There by the pair of old overshoes were Jamey Hankins' ice skates. There was old Walt Spoon's elk's tooth. There - his mother's own wedding ring! There was a world in the window of this remarkable old woman. And it was probable that when Miz Cunningham like an ancient barn owl fluttered and flapped to earth at last, they would take her away and pluck her open and find her belly lined with fur and feathers and the tiny mice skulls of myriad dreams.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth")”
― Davis Grubb, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Preacher walks away and stands for a spell staring out the cell window with his long, skinny hands folded behind him. Ben looks at those hands and shivers. What kind of a man would have his fingers tattooed that way? he thinks. The fingers of the right hand, each one with a blue letter beneath the gray, evil skin—L—O—V—E. And the fingers of the left hand done the same way only now the letters spell out H—A—T—E. What kind of a man? What kind of a preacher?”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“He thought again of the watch in the window. It had twelve black numbers on its moon face and there was magic to that. For these were numbers that were not really numbers at all but letters like in words. He shivered at the possibilities of such untold magic.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“Lord save little children! They abide.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“Salvation! Why, it’s always a last-minute business, boy.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“…old houses move in their sleep like the dreaming, remembering limbs of very old people. Boards whisper, steps cry out softly to the whispering remembrance of footfalls long gone to earth. Mantelpieces strain gently in the darkness beneath the ghosts of old Christmas stockings. Joists and beams and rafters hunch lightly like the brittle ribs of old women in their sleep: the heart recalling, the worn carpet slippers whispering down the halls again.”
― Davis Grubb

“It was a warm night for the end of March. Walt had left the front door to the ice-cream parlor open when he went out after supper to gossip with the old men down at Darly Stidger's Store. And yet it was not spring, although winter was dead and the moon was sickly with the neitherness of the time between those seasons: those last few weeks before the cries of the green frogs would rise in stitching clamor from the river shores and meadow bogs.”
― Davis Grubb

“Is goodness just for Sundays and is love just for Christmas? Must the living fragrance of human love be packed away with the tree ornaments once Christmas day is past?”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars

“Miz Cooper says don't pay her no mind because she is most likely one of them Duck River Baptists and probably a Republican ...”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“El Señor guarde a los niños! Pues todos ellos tienen su Predicador que los persigue por el sombrío río del miedo y la imposibilidad de expresar lo que sienten y las puertas cerradas. Todos son mudos y están solos, porque no hay palabras para expresar el miedo de un niño, ni oídos que le presten atención, y, si las hubiera, nadie las entendería aunque las oyera. ¡El Señor guarde a los niños! Los niños lo soportan todo y superan cualquier obstáculo.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“And the funny thing is this, Mrs. Alexander - there's not another looking glass in the whole entire house that makes me look so good! - not the big one over the parlor hearth - nor the peer glass in the hallway - or even the mirror over Mrs. Dance's dresser. So you see! The mirror's magic - that mirror - the one he gave me - because it tells me the sweetest lies about myself! I've looked into it time and time again since then - by daylight - by lamplight - by moon and starshine - and each time that dear little mirror says: Jewel Luchak, you're the prettiest girl in twelve green counties!

Mayra smiled and thought silently to herself: Couldn't it be, my child, that the Magic's not in the mirror at all? Couldn't it be that it's having someone love you is making you prettier all the time?”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars

“Su nombre es Harry Powell. Pero los nombres de sus dedos son R, O, M y A, y O, I, D y O y la historia que cuenta sobre que una mano es Odio y la otra Amor es una mentira, porque las dos son Odio, y verlas moverse me asusta todavía más que las sombras o que el viento.”
― Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

“Hate, my gentle lady, said Captain Anschutz, is only Love that has lost its way home in the dark.”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars

“I am afraid of Mr. Powell. I am more afraid of him than I have ever been of shadows or the thunder or when you look through the little bubble in the glass of the window in the upstairs hall and all of the out-of-doors stretches and twists its neck.”
― Davis Grubb

“It was as if, within that still winter night's vastness a strange soft-feathered bird of passage had come to beat its hopeless wings against the windows of her heart.”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars

“He thought: Because when you tell a lie it must be to keep from saying a worse thing. Then lying is not a Sin and God will not punish you. (But what if God is one of them?)”
― Davis Grubb

“Three windows, three faces. And the first face: the moon-face of Toby Dance. The first window, the parlor window of that solid frame house and the Christmas-dreaming, bright-eye gleaming face of five year old Toby Dance who, no more than a twinkling instant before, has sent a tissue paper letter up the roaring red throat of the parlor chimney; a prayerful inventory of certain wonders he should like to find beneath the enchanted tree next morning. And now he watches from the window all the capricious white wizardry of snow and the swathed, candied hills beyond the river and the Chinese Elm in the backyard now lofty and up-thrust against the pearled sky like a black, ermined dancer, and Toby sighs and sees his breath suddenly being upon the icy window pane and that printed breath is a faith that already ancient, faery legions of the Ice King are bearing his letter high and away for the right eyes to read.”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars

“The human heart's a marvelous creation. (...) It's the only organ in the body of man that works better after it's been broken. Broken and patched and ticking away at the world again, better than ever it was before.”
― Davis Grubb, The Voices of Glory

“Within the pleasant uncertainty of ignorance my imagination need mark no limits.”
― Davis Grubb, A Dream of Kings

“Three windows. And in the third, high in the top storey of the solid, snow-hushed house on this hill at the edge of Christmas the most extraordinary face of all: a visage of curious alloy: earthly wisdom and heavenly innocence, grief like a stone and humor like flame; a face of age and yet of ageless youth. Marya Alexander, mother of Nell Dance, sits in her flowered rocker by the glass and sees through it the soft, white onslaught of the snow and read within each intricately. Jeweled flake the timelessness of Time itself and of loss and of love and of love’s ending. Upon her old spectacles perches a small gold parakeet and she puffs now pensively upon a cigarette and blows the ghost of smoke against the enchanted window pane and witnesses there, for an instant, the misted image of faces long lost beneath so many snows, and smiles to herself at the knowing that Christmastide and a good heart’s breath against a cold pane are enough to bring lost faces back in evergreen eternity.”
― Davis Grubb, A Tree Full of Stars