34 Quotes by Reynolds Price

I always say the late 60s, early 70s in American education were really exciting times to teach. The late 70s, on the other hand, were awfully dull. People tended to be quiet and repressed and all headed off to business school or something.

I said to one of my students a couple of years ago, what is it with you people? You never get off the phone to one another, you travel through whole continents to be with one another for 14 hours. And he said, Mr. Price, we had to invent families of our own, our own families disappeared.

Our mothers, our aunts, the grandmothers, the babysitters, and if you're a boy, and you're a sensitive boy, which theoretically novelists are supposed to be, you do subliminally pick up a great deal about female sensibility.

I think if we are realistic, the South - the old Confederate states - really only has one entirely unique feature that other parts of the country don't have, and that is this nearly 400-year history of tremendous intimacy, in every sense of the word, good and evil, between two very different kinds of peoples: people who were brought here against their wishes from Africa and a largely Anglo-white population.

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

Everybody was there. A bachelor aunt or uncle. You would all come to the table, even some stone-deaf member of the family, usually the oldest ... and he would mumble something under his breath.

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

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

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.