Winter's Bone Quotes

“Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“She would never cry where her tears might be seen and counted against her.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“I said shut up once already, with my mouth.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Nobody here wants to be awful," he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. "It's just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The first time Ree kissed a man it was not a man, but Gail acting as a man, and as the kissing progressed and Gail acting as a man pushed her backwards onto a blanket of pine needles in shade and slipped her tongue deep into Ree's mouth, Ree found herself sucking on the wiggling tongue of a man in her mind, sucking that plunging tongue of the man in her mind until she tasted morning coffee and cigars and spit leaked from between her lips and down her chin. She opened her eyes then and smiled, and Gail yet acting the man roughed up her breasts with grabs and pinches, kissed her neck, murmuring and Ree said, "Just like that! I want it to be just like that!" There came three seasons of giggling and practice, puckering readily anytime they were alone, each being the man and the woman, each on top and bottom, pushing for it with grunts or receiving it with signs. The first time Ree kissed a boy who was not a girl his lips were soft and timid on hers, dry and unmoving, until finally she had to say it and did, "Tongue, honey, tongue," and the boy she called honey turned away saying, "Yuck!”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“No god craves weaklings.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family --- that's the always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in the dirt until she felt China through her skin.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“I'd get lost without the weight of you two on my shoulders.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Moons of ache glowed in spaces of her meat and when she moved the moons banged together and stunned.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Ree followed a path made by prey uphill through scrub, across a bald knob and downhill into a section of pine trees and pine scent and that pious shade and silence pines create. Pine trees in low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“That water's colder'n hell!"
That's what makes it good. That's what makes it help all your bruises'n bumps'n stuff."
It's colder'n a goddam witch's tit in there!”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Ree needed often to inject herself with pleasant sounds, stab those sounds past the constant screeching, squalling hubbub regular life raised inside her spirit, poke the soothing sounds past that racket and down deep where her jittering soul paced on a stone slab in a gray room, agitated and endlessly provoked but yearning to hear something that might bring a moment’s rest.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Ree sat chilled inside her squat tent. To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap… Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy… Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot…”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“Don’t fight if you can help it. But if one of you gets whipped by somebody both of you best come home bloody, understand?”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The going sun chucked a vast spread of red behind the ridgeline. A horizon of red light parsed into shafts by standing trees to throw pink in streaks across the valley snow.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone