57 Quotes by Bobbie Ann Mason

My father had all these great names for our cows. Bossy and Daisy and Petunia and Turnip. One of my jobs was to round up the cows before milking. I'd go out back with the dog and bring them in.

I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.

I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.

Bruce Springsteen's world is where everybody did these terrible jobs, if they had jobs at all, and he wanted something better.

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.

Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.

Sometimes a book I'm reading is so terrific that when I finish, I simply turn back to page one and start all over again to see what I've missed, to experience it again, more deeply, or because I don't want to let it go.

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.