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.
Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you’ve had sex with. A person you’ve licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.
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—have you learned that?
I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.
This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.
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.
I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won’t say I rested.
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.
The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t 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, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.
I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.
Texas humor and Southern humor are pretty similar.
I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.
I guess it’s ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.
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.