Larry Brown > Quotes

“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
― Larry Brown

“I can understand why people jump off bridges.”
― Larry Brown, Facing the Music

“I only had one life, and I'd be damned if I'd live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“Don't say what you would or wouldn't do, honey. Cause one day you might have to.”
― Larry Brown, Fay

“If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer ... it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came back up on Monday morning. And you had to go to work five more days. And it sucked.”
― Larry Brown, A Miracle of Catfish

“After a year in therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, 'Maybe life isn't or everyone.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“I didn't know why something that started off feeling so good had to wind up feeling so bad. Love was a big word and it covered a lot of territory. You could spend your whole life chasing after it and wind up with nothing, be an old bitter guy with long nose hair and ear hair and no teeth, hanging out in bars, looking for somebody your age, but the chances of success went down then. After a while you got too many strikes against you.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)”
― Larry Brown

“Reading, for pleasure and knowledge, has always been, will always be one of my favorite things to do. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)”
― Larry Brown

“I didn't want to see anything worse than me befall her.”
― Larry Brown

“You take what you're given, whether it's the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It's all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.”
― Larry Brown

“We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now . . . won't make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain't they?”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“Couldn’t get no closer and couldn’t get no further away.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“All we have to do as people is keep teaching children to read, and the rest will more than likely take care of itself.”
― Larry Brown

“Are you happy by yourself?” “I’m used to it,” he said. “That don’t mean I like it.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“That boy,” he said. “I’ve done him ever favor I could. Some folks you can’t do nothing with. Just sorry. God knows I’ve done plenty of drinking and stuff in my time, but I be damn if I ever tried to cheat anybody out of any money.”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“Most people who die in fires don't burn to death; they die from smoke inhalation that kills the respiratory system. that's why the fire service is going on and on about smoke detectors. These little ten-dollar gadgets are one of the truly wonderful inventions of man. The wake you up from a deep slumber so that you and your family and your dog or cat or whatever can get out of the house in time to live and call the fire department. If this sounds like a public service announcement, it is. If you don't have one, buy one today. They make great Christmas gifts. Plus they're cheap. Give a gift of love to a loved one you love. End of announcement.”
― Larry Brown

“People think man is cruel. Hey, what about the child of man? There ain’t nothing meaner than some little deranged six-year-old sadistic motherfucker loose in a playground. You think a person’s got to be grown before he’s a maniac? Shit.”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“In the countryside by nights without the moon, there sometimes roamed an indigent, a recycled reject with eyes sifting the darkness and sorting the scattered scents, walking beside deep hollows and ditches of stinking water. The hours he kept were usually reserved for the drunk and the sleeping. With his sloe-lidded eyes that in the daytime tried to hide from the sun, he spied treasures all over the land. No thing unlocked was safe from his grasp, he who could squat in the road and talk to the dogs and still their dying growls, all save one”
― Larry Brown, Joe

“I’ve seen Jesus. He just looks like you and me. You could meet Him out on the street and you wouldn’t know Him. I know why He ain’t come back. The world would probably find some way to kill Him again.”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“Here’s the one thing I don’t need: to get hooked up with somebody who has more problems than I do.”
― Larry Brown, Facing the Music

“Nothing worse than a drunken woman. Empty beer cans were all piled up around our feet. The end of romance is never easy.”
― Larry Brown, Facing the Music

“Nuttin matter. Everything just hunkin funkin dunky.” “You mean hunky dory?”
― Larry Brown, Facing the Music

“Fear. Help you get some heightened awareness.
- Braden Chaney”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“We ain’t having no more futile wars. Till we have one in the Middle East.”
― Larry Brown, Dirty Work

“they had more shit on tv than you could believe now.”
― Larry Brown, A Miracle of Catfish