67 Quotes by Edward P. Jones

The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.

A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.

Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn't seem to exist for me.

I’m fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors – black and white – because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.

Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.

Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself.

But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don’t go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.