Michael McDowell > Quotes

“Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.”
― Michael McDowell

“I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.”
― Michael McDowell

“In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.”
― Michael McDowell, Cold Moon Over Babylon

“That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment-these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.”
― Michael McDowell, The Flood

“Savage mothers eat their children!”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“To have a family is real strange,” said India thoughtfully. “All these people you wouldn’t have anything to do with except that they’re related to you.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“I am a commercial writer and I'm proud of that. I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.”
― Michael McDowell

“Alcoholism is a disease,” she said. “Like athlete’s foot. Or herpes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Luker and I have lots of friends who are alcoholics. And speed freaks too.” “Well,”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“And among adults, adultery is an unmentionable thing, which only occurs in the Bible and in Mobile.”
― Michael McDowell, The Amulet

“India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. —Walt Whitman Sequel to Drum-Taps”
― Michael McDowell, Cold Moon Over Babylon

“I sort of wish that was what happened though, Ginny, because that would mean the girl is all right. Fourteen-year-old girls have run off before."

Ginny eyed the sheriff severely. "Not fourteen-year-old girls who had grandmas like Evelyn Larkin.”
― Michael McDowell, Cold Moon Over Babylon

“In the middle of the afternoon, when the heat was at its worst, having accumulated around the concrete since early in the morning, I had ten minutes or so of respite in my tiny office. The walls there were blistering. I could scarcely breathe. But I fled there as if it had been a cool, wet, autumn day inside. I was not looking for relief from the heat so much as relief from the crowds. They licked away my being with their idiot tongues.”
― Michael McDowell

“She had got beyond despair.”
― Michael McDowell, The Amulet

“No matter what you've gone through, no matter what you've done and suffered, no matter what horrible mistakes you've made, no matter what you've given up that you should have held on to, no matter what you've held on to that you should have let go, no matter what has happened to make you unhappy, you cannot wish for it to have happened any other way.”
― Michael McDowell, Rain

“It’s bad when the dead talk in dreams,” said Odessa.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things. To have informed the men who hung about the seed and feed stores that two women had bought Gavin Pond and were turning it into the biggest farm in the county would have brought out calls to repeal the voting rights amendment; but when confronted with Grace, the men were perfectly willing to accept her, her cousin Lucille, and Lucille's little boy.”
― Michael McDowell, The War

“she hates that levee the way you and I hate hell and the Republicans.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.”
― Michael McDowell, The Levee

“Merle Weaver stroked the little girl's hair and thought of the two corpses in the rear of the truck.”
― Michael McDowell, The Amulet

“To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut.”
― Michael McDowell, The Levee

“There’s no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children's gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too.”
― Michael McDowell, The Levee

“No mother and daughter in Perdido were closer than Mary Love Caskey and Sister. But it was not to be supposed that either told the other everything she thought or knew. In fact, each of them liked to keep little secrets from the other. Secrets which could be sprung at some opportune moment to produce a grand effect, rather in the manner of a little boy tossing lighted firecrackers beneath his sister's bed while she napped on a hot summer afternoon.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater, Vol. 1: The Flood / The Levee / The House

“È un errore madornale credere che i pettegolezzi interessino più alle donne che agli uomini.”
― Michael McDowell, The Flood

“To them all, Beldame represented the fair and possible reward for distress, misfortune, and labor in this world—it was to them a heaven on earth, and resembled the other, preached-of heaven in that it was bright, remote, timeless, and empty.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“I never worked on a farm, he told himself ruefully, but I think I know a vegetable when I see one.”
― Michael McDowell, The Amulet