31 Quotes by Michael McDowell

To have a family is real strange,” said India thoughtfully. “All these people you wouldn’t have anything to do with except that they’re related to you.

It’s bad when the dead talk in dreams,” said Odessa.

Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. – Walt Whitman Sequel to Drum-Taps.

Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference. Having.

No mother and daughter in Perdido were closer than Mary Love Caskey and Sister. But it was not to be supposed that either told the other everything she thought or knew. In fact, each of them liked to keep little secrets from the other. Secrets which could be sprung at some opportune moment to produce a grand effect, rather in the manner of a little boy tossing lighted firecrackers beneath his sister’s bed while she napped on a hot summer afternoon.

To them all, Beldame represented the fair and possible reward for distress, misfortune, and labor in this world – it was to them a heaven on earth, and resembled the other, preached-of heaven in that it was bright, remote, timeless, and empty.

India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude.

I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, “I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.

I never worked on a farm, he told himself ruefully, but I think I know a vegetable when I see one.