Daniel Woodrell

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.

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.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

Sammy, wouldn__ you like to add up to something? In the future? Amount to something?___aw. I just figure to roll on, stackin_ days, you know, till the day I fuck up big enough the future gets canceled. Or else all planned out for me, maybe. There__ a somewhat likely chance of that.___an, Sammy, I can__ live thinking that way""Well,I don't think about it.

You wake up in this here world, my sweet li'l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin' and you stay tough 'til lights out__ave you learned that?

Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you__e had sex with. A person you__e licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.

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.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.

I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.

Texas humor and Southern humor are pretty similar.

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

No god craves weaklings.

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can__ live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin_ wide in the turns.

I FELL DEEP down in there, until this bright light raised me from sleep. Coming out of a pit such as that, you think the bright light could be God or a cop on patrol.