Reynolds Price Quotes

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women