Kaye Gibbons Quotes

Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?

I am a great believer in variations on the routine.

Mothers smell blood before the wound is given. We see the rent place on the child's arm before the arrow strikes.

That's all my grandfather was guilty of, fear, faith in his words, but that was a high crime in her eyes. That's all Jack was guilty of that day, but I've lived with him a good while and I believe I understand him. Sometimes it might take an afternoon or evening of being here in this kitchen alone, thinking, but I can usually come to see his reasons through his ways. And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don't you believe it to be so?

I could lay here and read all night. I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have the time when your brain has nothing to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do something right up until you fall asleep.

You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him.

The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying, indicated that he had a great back jam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken...out bubbled all the words he had swallowed when he was alive.

I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

I could wake her up and ask have you ever been to the ocean? but I already know that answer. She has not. You can tell. It would humble you I whisper to her sleeping if you for one time stood by something stronger than yourself.

I might be confused sometimes in my head but it is not something you need to talk about. Before you can talk you have to line it all up in order and I had rather just let it swirl around until I am too tired to think. You just let the motion in your head wear you out. Never think about it. You just make a bigger mess that way.

You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.

It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad, they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.

When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.