Dowell Quotes & Sayings

It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid ... Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness. — Coleman Dowell

When I think about everything that's happened since school started, well, I don't think the word 'normal' applies to any of it. Verbena is right - I'm way past normal. Only I've realized that when you move beyond normal, the road you're on doesn't necessarily take you to the land of the abnormal or the weird or the freakish. Instead you might find yourself in a place where people build Freedom School and have the courage to live large. It's a place where people don't worry too much when they get a little goat poop on their shoes. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Perhaps you'll apprentice to a healer when you're older," Grete suggested. "I'd say you have the gift for it."
Hen reddened, then seemed suddenly fascinated with a speck on her shoe. "Be nice to have a gift for something," she said after a moment. "But they don't let girls apprentice, now, do they?"
Grete harrumphed. "A bunch of fools, the lot who came up with that system. You lose half the world's brainpower that way. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Tobin, my man, you are going to learn about chickens. And when you to learn about chickens, you will learn about life. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

I'm convinced that Sanford and Son shows middle-class America a lot of what they need to know. — Redd Foxx

What's really weird is my mom's clothes smell like her. I mean, her perfume, and so all day it's like m mom has been walking right beside me. Which, you have to admit, a pretty freaky feeling. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

You gonna stand in my backyard and ignore me to my face? — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Life is a gift; value it.
Life is a trial; endure it.
Life is a journey; complete it.
Life is a test; pass it.
Life is a task; fulfill it.
Life is an opportunity; use it.
Life is a moment; enjoy it.
Life is a mission; accomplish it. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming. — Coleman Dowell

He's experienced.
He has a mind.
He seduced me and took his time doing it.
He's good company.
He makes me think.
Knowing him has changed me forever. — Coleman Dowell

Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told. — Harpo Marx

It is necessary to have party organization if we are to have effective and efficient government. The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization, and the only difference between a disorganized country and one that has the advantage of a wise and sound government is fundamentally a question of organization. — Calvin Coolidge

I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.'
'Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Expand and extend yourself to effectively fulfill purpose — Sunday Adelaja

Everybody's broken, sweetie. God helps us get put back together.
~Rev. Mayes
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be — Frances O'Roark Dowell

I don't know if I'm a method actor. — Caleb Landry Jones

A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly. — Zoe Heller

All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of him, and this done after he is safely dead. — Coleman Dowell

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way.
p92 — Frances O'Roark Dowell

4. If you do not give your chickens enough space, light, air, and walking-around room, they will eat one another. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

I'm not done arguing with you, Mrs.Fletcher. I'm going to convince you yet." "Well I reckon I got ten or twenty more years in me before I pass on," Granny told him. "So feel free to take your time. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Saying 'no' is not hard for me; it's scarier for me to say 'yes.' I'm actually more afraid of commitment than of saying 'no.' — Evangeline Lilly

What filled the rooms of Grete's cottage so decidedly were woven baskets and wooden boxes and clay pots glazed in red and blue, each with its own mishmash of this and that. Roots and leaves still redolent of dirt. Balls of scratchy wool-purple twining into pink easing into periwinkle fading into gray. At least three boxes held squares and strips of fabric, all colors, and eight pots overflowed with apples.
The walls were lined with shelves, the shelves were lined with books. Wordless spines peered out. As soon as Isabelle saw them, she itched to open it up and read it from cover to cover. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

We've been around for a long time, Mr. Dowell. Longer than you or any of your stupid little friends could ever conceive. Sleeping in the shadows and waiting for the right moment. A disease you might call us. A plague. Evil. From beneath the ground, it rises as it has done many times in the past. — Jeyn Roberts

Dream girl? Ain't such a thing. You walk, you talk, you got mammary glands, well, that's gonna do it right there for most guys. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor. — Coleman Dowell

I have to say, it felt good to be wanted, son. Felt real good. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today), or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. They concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods. — Jared Diamond

Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

James got some good looks that he just didn't knock down, as did Buckley. James has been pretty consistent, but the reality is when he and Melvin go 2 for 21 and Solomon (Jones) only gets four offensive rebounds, this is going to be the outcome. — Robert McCullum

If you fall in love with a character, then you are actually falling in love with the author that wrote the character. Therefore, you could conclude that if you are said author, you are in love with yourself. — Heather Dowell

Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance. — Sylvia Plath

You can't expect a person to love an animal they might see decapitated at any minute. It ain't realistic, I told Miss Blue, who was gulping down her worm. She looked up at me like it shocked her to learn that some chickens got treated that way. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Barbra Streisand has accomplished so much, and Dustin Hoffman as well. They are down to earth and approachable. I admire that. — Kevin Hart

Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will. — Coleman Dowell

My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress. — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Granny sat down on the step and stared off into the trees. That girl right there, she was my only child. I have lost two husbands, one by death, the other by divorce, and I have lost my parents and my brothers and sisters. But nothing ever pierced me to the core like that little girl's dying. I know it wasn't your daddy's fault. I know I messed up by filling a report to Social Services. Is that what you want to here? Is that what it takes for you not to be mad at me? — Frances O'Roark Dowell

Quit it already. I'm pretty enough as it is. — Frances O'Roark Dowell