Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings > Quotes

“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its sesonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time..."
”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks...Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I've been uneasy all my life...I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to get their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.

—Penny Baxter”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“We were bred of earth before we were bred of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. ... We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“He watched the sun rise beyond the grape arbor. In the thin golden light the young leaves and tendrils of the Scuppernong were like Twink Weatherby's hair. He decided that sunrise and sunset both gave him a pleasantly sad feeling. The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color dried corn husks.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“I see no reason for denying so fundamental an urge, ruin or no. It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily. Yet to achieve content under sometimes adverse circumstances, requires first an adjustment within oneself, and this I had already made, and after that, a recognition that one is not unique in being obliged to toil and struggle and suffer. This is the simplest of all facts and the most difficult for the individual ego to accept. As I look back on those first difficult times at the Creek, when it seemed as though the actual labor was more than I could bear, and the making of a living on the grove impossible, it was old black Martha who drew aside a curtain and led me in to the company of all those who had loved the Creek and been tormented by it.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Good" is what helps us or at least does not hinder. "Evil" is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“At one time or another most of us at the Creek have been suspected of a degree of madness. Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity ...”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“He lay down beside the fawn. He put one arm across its neck. It did not seem to him that he could ever be lonely again.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“He edged closer to his father’s bones and sinews. Penny slipped an arm around him and he lay close against the lank thigh. His father was the core of safety. His father swam the swift creek to fetch back his wounded dog. The clearing was safe, and his father fought for it, and for his own. A sense of snugness came over him and he dropped asleep.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“He set down the milk pails to rest and stared at the bright house. This was a man’s great joy, to come at nightfall after his day’s work to a lighted house. . . . and his beloved was waiting for him with food and warmth and comfort.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“This, then, was hunger. This was what his mother had meant when she had said, "We'll all go hongry." He had laughed, for he had thought he had known hunger, and it was faintly pleasant. He knew now that it had been only appetite. This was another thing.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“It had been so brief a sojourn, not even a full century. He had been a guest in a mansion and he was not ungrateful. He was at once exhausted and refreshed. His stay was ended. Now he must gather up the shabby impedimenta of his mind and body and be on his way again.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Sojourner

“The wild animals seemed less predatory to him than people he had known.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“I have found that there is romance in housework: and charm in it; and whimsy and humor without end. I have found that the housewife works hard, of course–but likes it. Most people who amount to anything do work hard, at whatever their job happens to be. The housewife’s job is home-making, and she is, in fact, ‘making the best of it’; making the best of it by bringing patience and loving care to her work; sympathy and understanding to her family; making the best of it by seeing all the fun in the day’s incidents and human relationships.

The housewife realizes that home-making is an investment in happiness. It pays everyone enormous dividends. There are huge compensations for the actual labor involved…

There are unhappy housewives, of course. But there are unhappy stenographers and editresses and concert singers. The housewife whose songs I sing as I go about my work, is the one who likes her job (pp. 6-7).

From Songs of a Housewife: Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“Ma Baxter rocked complacently. They were all pleased whenever she made a joke. Her good nature made the same difference in the house as the hearth-fire had made in the chill of the evening.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“In the village he [My friend Moe] said once, "Me and her is buddies, see? If her gate falls down, I go and fix it. If I git in a tight for money she helps me if she's got it, and if she ain't got it, she gits it for me. We stick together. You got to stick to the bridge that carries you across.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Penny's bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more that his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood. And if, on a soft day in April, the boy had prowled away on his boy's business, he could understand the thing that had drawn him. He understood, too, its briefness.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Jody said, "Ma, you're shore good."

"Oh, yes. When it's rations."

"Well, I'd a heap ruther you was good about rations and mean about other things."

"Oh, I be mean, be I?"

"Only about jest a very few things," he soothed her.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“I'm eating' it quick... but I'll remember it a long time.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling