The Southern Novels Quotes

“The Giver of Breath is God of the Choctaw, but no different from the white man’s God—the same God, without favorites, with love for all men and women.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“you men are worse about hangin’ on to old clothes than little babies with their blankets”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“. It took us both — and Mom, too, and just about everybody in town — a long time to accept the fact that he and his wife had done such evil things. Though he wasn’t evil through and through, or else why would he have saved my life? I don’t think anyone is evil beyond saving. Maybe I’m like Dad that way: naive. But better naive, I think, than calloused to the core. It dawned on me sometime later about Dr. Dahninaderke and his nightly vigils at the shortwave radio. I firmly believe he was listening to the foreign countries for news on who else in the Nazi regime had been captured and brought to justice. I believe that under his cool exterior he lived in perpetual terror, waiting for that knock on the door. He had delivered agonies, and he had suffered them, too. Would he have killed me once he had that green feather in his fist, as he and Kara had tortured and killed Jeff Hannaford over blackmail money? I honestly don’t know. Do you?”
― Robert R. McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“How could it be, he wondered, that one’s own parents were often the most distant strangers”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“But I have tried — I have tried — to make them understand the miracle the way I and Sister Caroline see it. That flesh is going to die, yes. It’s going to leave this world, and that’s the way life is. But I believe in the miracle that though flesh dies, the spirit does not. It goes on,”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“A world without miracles … well, that would be a world I wouldn’t care to live in.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Gravity shrank you and time pulled you into the grave,”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“His father, the quitter, had not raised a quitter.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Some women are Wedgwood, and some are Tupperware.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“John feared the blue evening twilight, when—his father had said—God’s Eye roamed the world like a burning sun, in search of the sinners who would die that night.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“No, I don’t believe in that kind of Hell. Not at the center of the world, not with devils carrying pitchforks. But Hell is right here on earth, John, and people can step into it without knowing, and they can’t get out”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Ever heard of Franklin Fitzgerald? Otherwise known as Big Philly Frank?”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“And I can’t figure this faith thing out,” I went on. “Mom says I ought to have it. Reverend Lovoy says I’ve got to have it. But what if there’s nothin’ to have faith in, Davy Ray? What if faith is just like talkin’ on a telephone when there’s nobody on the other end, but you don’t know nobody’s there until you ask ’em a question and they don’t answer? Wouldn’t it make you go kind of crazy, to think you spent all that time jawin’ to thin air?”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“I wished there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that had been. It would be a living memorial to the generations who had gone on before, and you could hear their voices though those voices had been stilled for a hundred years. It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed. We had thrown away the past, and our future was impoverished for it.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“I remember hearing this somewhere: when an old man dies, a library burns down.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Is heaven better than Zephyr?” I asked him. “A million times better,” he said. “Do they have comic books there?”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“I didn’t know where heaven was anymore. I wasn’t sure if God had any sense, or plan or reason, or if maybe He, too, was in the dark. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore: not life, not afterlife, not God, not goodness.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Milk in plastic jugs. What’ll they figure out next to mess things up?”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Dad sat down in his chair again and picked up the sports page where he’d left off. All the headlines were about Alabama and Auburn football games, the religions of autumn.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“when it rained while the sun showed, the devil was beating his wife.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“If I am ever on death row, the walk to the electric chair will be no more terrifying than that walk from my desk to the chalk in Mrs. Harper’s hand and then, ultimately, to the blackboard.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“We were in our secret hearts excited about the beginning of school. There comes a time when freedom becomes … well, too free.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“Having your teacher talk to you like a regular person is a disconcerting feeling.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“When your parents get scared, your heart starts pounding ninety miles a minute.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“don’t you ever wish — even for just a fleeting moment — that you could have your first bike again? You remember what it looked like. You remember. Did you name it Trigger, or Buttermilk, or Flicka, or Lightning? Who took that bike away, and where did it go? Don’t you ever, ever wonder?”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“It seemed to me that Mr. Sculley understood the very nucleus of existence, that he had kept his young eyes and young heart even though his body had grown old. He saw straight through to the cosmic order of things, and he knew that life is not held only in flesh and bone, but also in those objects — a good, faithful pair of shoes; a reliable car; a pen that always works; a bike that has taken you many a mile — into which we put our trust and which give us back the security and joy of memories.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

“When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe.”
― Robert McCammon, The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing