Tom Franklin Quotes & Sayings

He buys Playboy magazines and looks through them once, then gives them to me. That's what it's like to be rich.
Here's what it's like to be poor. Your wife leaves you because you can't find a job because there aren't any jobs to find. You empty the jar of pennies on the mantel to buy cigarettes. You hate to answer the phone; it can't possibly be good news. When your friends invite you out, you don't go. After a while, they stop inviting. You owe them money, and sometimes they ask for it. You tell them you'll see what you can scrape up.
Which is this: nothing. — Tom Franklin

Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith. This is the one most closely associated with the 1927 flood, — Tom Franklin

field beyond field beyond field of well-kept cotton, each tuft white as a senator's eyebrow. — Tom Franklin

never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it. — Tom Franklin

Baseball," he said. "Babe Ruth." Dixie Clay saw now that the boy wore a satchel honeycombed with rolled newspapers. The world was still going on, was it. — Tom Franklin

the south where these stories take place - is lower Alabama, lush and green and full of death, the wooded counties between the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. — Tom Franklin

My baby. My baby. She loved to call him Willy, but others could also call him Willy. Only she could say, My baby. But as much as he was her baby then, he was more so now, after the vigil on her knees, after the curses and after the prayers, after the weeping and after the begging, after going into the deepest blackest place. — Tom Franklin

In the divorce my ex got everything. Even kept her composure. — Tom Franklin

Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn't be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living. — Tom Franklin

Back water done rose at Sumner," sings Patton, "drove poor Charlie down, down the line. — Tom Franklin

In the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves ... — Tom Franklin

I realized how lucky I was to have been raised here in these southern woods among poachers and storytellers. — Tom Franklin

Smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck. — Tom Franklin

The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people. — Tom Franklin

they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain't we. — Tom Franklin

He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Later he says, "Listen here, you men, / one more thing I'd like to say / Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away. — Tom Franklin

The visit hadn't lasted much longer, and Wallace never said what he'd done, but after Larry watched him go, he'd spent the rest of the night on his porch as daylight crept through the trees like am army of crafty boys. — Tom Franklin

Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar. — Tom Franklin

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?"
"Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted."
"Roy's a loan shark, too?"
"You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked.
Glen said he had.
"How 'bout THE GODFATHER?"
"Yeah."
"Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy."
from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES — Tom Franklin

At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was. — Tom Franklin

Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did. — Tom Franklin

Coming back like this to hunt for details for my stories feels a bit like poaching on land that used to be mine. But I've never lost the need to tell of my Alabama, to reveal it, lush and green and full of death. So I return, knowing what I've learned. — Tom Franklin

He was tired of having only three channels. — Tom Franklin

Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream. — Tom Franklin

Dawn crept up out of the trees, defining a bole, a burl, a leaf at a time the world he'd spent the night trying to comprehend. But what would daylight offer except the illusion of understanding? At least in darkness you were spared the pretending. — Tom Franklin

Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face. — Tom Franklin

the writing process behind The Tilted World. — Tom Franklin

She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood. — Tom Franklin

He found the first skipped meals were the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn't know how hungry you were, how empty you'd become. Wallace's visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it. — Tom Franklin

Who wouldn't admire the gall of a fellow brings a machine gun and a peck of hired killers to his own goddamn trial? Who wouldn't admire a fellow never leaves a trail of evidence? That's got this far in the world and galled so many folks and killed twice that number and cheated the rest, all without being blowed to itty bitty pieces or hanged by his goddamn neck or succumbing to one of countless infirmities he seems to collect like a goddamn hobby, hell yeah I admire the son-of-a-bitch. — Tom Franklin

Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook."
But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life. — Tom Franklin

But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling. — Tom Franklin

Daylight crept through the trees like an army of crafty boys. — Tom Franklin

The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly. — Tom Franklin

Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences? — Tom Franklin

What damn fool punches his own horse? — Tom Franklin

On the other end of the porch the swing creaked pleasantly on its chains. This was the time of home-night he enjoyed, when his wife was inside asleep and he, at last, was alone. Time of year he enjoyed, too, the kind of peaceable weather you needed sleeves for but not a coat, chill in the air to make your scalp tingle but not set you to shivering. — Tom Franklin

all monsters were misunderstood. — Tom Franklin

High Water Everywhere" by Charlie Patton. If you have a hard time making out the lyrics, you're not alone - even Son House (who, along with Howlin' Wolf, was influenced by Patton) — Tom Franklin

He was the kind of man who grew better looking the longer you knew him. Whereas Jesse began to tarnish the moment you took him off the shelf. — Tom Franklin

Down Hearted Blues, by Bessie Smith. This is the song Ingersoll is singing to the baby — Tom Franklin

Where's that tree?" Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. "Is the rope still there?" Glancing at him, his father said, "Naw." "What happened to it?" "They cut it down. Mill did." He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. "Enjoyed it," he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den. — Tom Franklin