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Quotes of the day: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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Published Thursday, August 07, 2014 @ 9:57 PM EDT
Aug 07 2014

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie. The book was written long before the concept of young-adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

'Good' is what helps us or at least does not hinder. 'Evil' is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.

Here in Florida the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing, making no rustle in their passing.

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.

If there can be such a thing as instinctual memory, the consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of the earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without our mothers or our fathers or any other kin or friend, or even human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in mans heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.

Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.

Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.

The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

We need above all, I think, a certain remoteness from urban confusion.

When a wave of love takes over a human being... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.

Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember.


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