“Work and pray, live on hay,You'll get pie in the sky when you die.-Joe Hill, The Preacher and the Slave”

“I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garl...”

“This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go dri...”

“It paid to be cultured, just as long as you didn't start growing bacteria.”

“He just knew we would find luck, but believing something don't make it true.”

“You raise them half-decent, and they grow up and leave. They move to Miami or California-- someplace with gourmet groceries and nude beaches because you've reared them to cook good and be liberal m...”

“An extended hand is the best weapon against a clenched fist.”

“If you want your life to stand for peace and kindness, it's helpful to do kind, peaceful things.”

“Demonstrating verbal kindness looks better on everyone know matter what the situation. There's a peace in the heart of the kind person who handles everything with love.”

“The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.”

“Trees down south have a difference to them, a subtle, slinking movement, mile by mile- a gracefulness, a swagger. Lanky trees stretching out their wiry thin, Spanish moss-covered branches, moss tha...”