Reynolds Price > Quotes

“Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.”
― Reynolds Price, Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides

“Strength just comes in one brand— you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.”
― Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

“Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.”
― Reynolds Price, The Tongues of Angels

“Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.”
― Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

“Almost all of my really good times have been silent but have had to end.”
― Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”
― Reynolds Price, A Palpable God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible With an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative

“Did I think then, or do I believe later, that the vision was in any sense a direct call to me from God or some other intelligent force in nature? Was it a gesture uniquely intended to draw me near? Near to whom and for what? Am I ready to say, at this late point in my life, that I was singled out in childhood for special attention from God?
No, I'm not. I think it's possible that such revelations await a good many people who are lucky enough, or careful enough, to spend solitary time in feasible places and to be prepared-consciously or accidentally-to listen to a widely available transmission.”
― Reynolds Price, Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith

“Every other way is like that -- him waiting for something to happen to him, daring somebody to do something nice such as come up and touch him just so he could say, 'Why in the world did you do that?' and hold on tight till whoever bothered him vanished -- and nothing about him since has ever surprised me.”
― Reynolds Price

“We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us.”
― Reynolds Price, A Palpable God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible With an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative

“Women then very seldom wore watches. They did their chores till the chores were finished or they fell over dead, whichever came first.”
― Reynolds Price, Roxanna Slade

“In the next long minute, he felt an understanding spread deep down inside him, an understanding that he'd only felt with animals before--with poor old Hilda and the hawks he'd seen in tall bare trees and that buck deer, long ago in the woods, that spoke Ben's name and told him the world was a fine place to live, hard but fine.”
― Reynolds Price, A Perfect Friend

“In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago--burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives; then confronted in words by the flaming demands of a recently dead, maybe resurrected Jew named Jesus with a ravenous will to change us and the Earth.”
― Reynolds Price, Three Gospels

“The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto - people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

Now I've changed my mind and will try again. Two big new reasons. Nobody in my family lives for long, and last week I found somebody I'd lost or thrown away. All he knows about me is the little he's heard. He hasn't laid eyes on me since he was a baby and I vanished while he was down for a nap. I may very well be the last thing he wants at this late date. I'm his natural mother; he's almost forty and has got on without me.”
― Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden