Bret Lott Quotes & Sayings

I saw Tory's face as I took my beating. I saw myself pulled up by Pastor from the Pearl River, wet and shaking and miserable in the Lord, Missy Cook on the bank and crying tears meant for nothing but effect, and I knew then I was no better than my grandmother, knew no matter how hard you prayed, no matter how shiny the stones in your pocket, no matter how far behind you you thought your old lives were, they were never gone. They were never more than an inch from the surface, battling every moment you breathed, each and every moment of every day fighting to rise up and take you over. And I'd lost, let those old lives win just now. — Bret Lott

Tell the truth, but understand that it is not necessarily what happened," is one of the things she told him. "Every good story is a parable," is another. — Bret Lott

I felt on my back gentle pats like fragile wings just touching me, touching me: my grandchildren's hands. — Bret Lott

Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end. — Bret Lott

literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition. — Bret Lott

Learning to write ... is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest. — Bret Lott

Don't leave you to go find your point of view and your story. You are all you have been given ... this is who you are, and from where you ought and need to write. — Bret Lott

Were it not for the relationship I have with Christ, the world surely would have run me down by now ... Certainly I'll never find the level of compassion Christ carried, but trying to learn that compassion is enough to carry me through. — Bret Lott