Sean Dietrich > Quotes

“I once spent an entire summer in Georgia with relatives who drank decaf. Worst summer of my life. Without caffeine, I didn't have the personality God gave a houseplant.”
― Sean Dietrich, Sean of the South: Whistling Dixie

“I’ll be honest with you. The variables that construct my existence are confusing. Like handwritten math equations jammed together on a sloppy page of homework. They don’t make any sense. One math problem leads to another, and then another and so it goes.

One day you realize that your life is one whole page of problems and nothing ever gets solved.

One ongoing equation with no equal sign at the end. But it occurred to me, beneath the canopy of a starlight heaven, that I’d been looking at my life all wrong.

It wasn’t a math equation. Things weren’t supposed to add up. There was no solution.

In fact, there was no problem. Life’s variables and numbers and pages of chicken scratch weren’t mathematical marks. They were art. A drawing. An abstract painting. It was meant to be beautiful, not sensical. And embedded within the mess of it all were miracles. Small ones. I’d never paid attention to them because I was too busy, but it didn’t make them less real.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“I believe that ugly childhoods make pretty people.”
― Sean Dietrich

“November. It was already getting cold in the Panhandle. I'm talking bone cold. Temperatures were sinking all the way to sixty-two degrees in some places.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“At sundown, our world comes alive, all nature feeds upon itself. The algae gets eaten by the mullet, the mullet get eaten by the redfish, the redfish get eaten by the pelicans, the pelicans get eaten by the chipmunks. No, I'm only kidding; I don't know what eats the pelicans.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“For some people, the transition to adulthood happens almost overnight. It certainly did with me. I’ve met other orphans. We are kids who can’t even pinpoint when this change happened. We have felt like old people since our fathers died.
Our mothers looked to us for big decisions. They relied on us. Before we ever went out on our first date, we were already acting like a retired father of four. All our paychecks went toward rent. All our spare time went toward helping to keep a home fire burning.
We got so good at pretending we were older than our age that we started to believe it. We begin to hate our own reflections because they betray how we see ourselves. The mirror portrays us too young. We are not children; we are ancient. We’re fifty years old thirty-five years before our fiftieth birthday.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“But then, life was full of overlooked miracles. And miracles never happened the way you expect them to. They are softer than a baby's breath. They are, at times, as noticeable as a ladybug. A miracle is not a big thing. A miracle is millions and millions of small things working together.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk

“I scrubbed in the water while Ellie Mae chased a jackrabbit that was wandering on the shore. She nearly caught the rabbit, but the rabbit called for reinforcements. Soon nearly eighty rabbits emerged from the brush and began chasing my dog across the Texas plains. These were not rabbits like we have in Florida. Some of these were carrying tomahawks, and a few were on horseback.”
― Sean Dietrich , Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“The first thing I did was eat barbecue. I have always found that barbecue helps the human body work better. The cholesterol lubricates the mental passages.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“I grew up believing that fried chicken was a holy dish, and chickens were fundamentalist birds placed on earth to be fried for the forgiveness of sins.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“Soon they were in a remote place where residents had to mail-order sunshine from Montgomery Ward. — Sean Dietrich. “Kinfolk.” HarperCollins, 2023-11-14, p. 160”
― Sean Dietrich

“He was a dry man with the personality of mayonnaise.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“The officers spoke with country drawls so thick you could have used them to pave county roads, and they seemed about as intelligent as dishwater.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“who was old enough to own an autographed Bible pub.HarperCollins, 2023-11-14, p. 157”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk

“Sneakers had come a long way since his childhood. When he was a kid, shoes were made of stiff leather. They cut into your feet and made your heels bleed until, finally, the shoes were broken in, at which point they ceremoniously fell apart and it was time for a new pair. That was the way the good Lord intended people to buy shoes. Although, truth be told, Nub didn’t know much about shoes. Growing”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“You want Reverend Davis to do it?” said Jimmy. “Good gracious,” said Eleanor. “No,” said Winston. “I don’t want him doing it. He doesn’t even know me. He just wouldn’t get it, he’s from New York.” “Connecticut,” said Tommy. “And he’s a big Dodgers fan.” Winston said, “Well, since you put it that way.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“Winston stepped off the porch to greet them before anyone else. But Jimmy raced after him. Soon the two men were moving in a controlled but fierce footrace across the church lawn with bulletins flying from their hands, nudging innocent pedestrians and helpless elderly people out of the way. In the end, Jimmy won because Winston was in no shape to compete. When they reached Eleanor, both men were out of breath, and there was a long trail of church leaflets strewn behind them.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“But then, life was full of overlooked miracles. And miracles never happen the way you expect them to.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“You thought you knew how today would go, but you were way off base. You thought you had everything figured out, but you couldn’t have been more wrong if you had been born a pineapple.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“A miracle is not a big thing. A miracle is millions and millions of small things working together.”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“A man spends a lifetime learning how to run the machine that is the human body, and just when he gets the hang of it, it breaks.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“Maybe he was a dashing bandleader whose fortune cookie once read, “You will meet a Methodist woman with chubby legs who makes great pies and owns, not one, but two very sassy but also modest bathing suits.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“Who knows if that’s true.”
― Sean Dietrich, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay

“The lowest point on planet Earth was in the Pacific, called the Challenger Deep ocean trench. As a young seaman, Nub had spent many a night staring over the stanchions of the USS North Carolina wondering what was beneath that colorless deepwater. Maybe”
― Sean Dietrich, Kinfolk: A Novel by “Sean of the South”

“Anyone who can fog up a mirror can dance.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“When you love someone, you trust them to hold your entire life in their hands, like a fragile object, like a vase, like crystal ware. When they leave you for another, they throw your vase against the floor. Vases are never vases after that. They can be reglued, but they won’t hold water.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“Lisa was an uptight woman married to the oldest Baptist deacon in town who preached against the dangers of “premarital relations” with the opposite sex because this might lead to dancing.”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne

“You cannot erase your own history,”
― Sean Dietrich, The Incredible Winston Browne