Cameron DeCessna > Cameron's 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

“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

“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..."
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― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“You kin tame arything, son, excusin’ the human tongue.”
― 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

“It occurred to him that the increasing patience of age was as great a myth as the unalloyed joy of youth. The longer he lived, the less tolerance he had for the patently evil.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Sojourner

“The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other perches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffon. There is no magic here except the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove. Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“The wild animals seemed less predatory to him than people he had known.”
― 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

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

“The boys are lovely, dead and alive!" said O. Wilde,'And the girl is nice too, I suppose.”
― Oscar Wilde