Beth Duke > Beth's Quotes

“There are diamonds in the red clay of northeast Alabama. Delaney is one of them.”
― Beth Duke

“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
― Francesco Petrarca

“I have the same fantasy every time I read a book I love, no matter who wrote it, no matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.”
― Adam Langer, The Salinger Contract

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
― J.D. Salinger

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“You should always walk like you have a crown on your head, Ronni. You are beautiful when you radiate confidence. Remember that.”
― Beth Duke, It All Comes Back to You