Quotes from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“...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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“He was tired of having only three channels.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Larry felt a strange forgiveness for him because all monsters were misunderstood.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain’t we.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“You can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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. Maybe, after all this time, he'd started to believe their version of him.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“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, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“It was country dark, as Alice Jones had called these nights, the absence of any light but what you brought to the table. He sped up, his eyes focused on what was before him, and drove toward home.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Sound more mean than crazy,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to go”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“interviewing that people said he could make a stump confess to saying “timber.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Bad cotton country meant good moonshining country.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“... that she might slip off into that space where she stared, go for good to whatever she kept watching.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

About the author

Popular quotes

“Hello! Hunk getting naked time. You expected me not to look?”
― Dana Marie Bell, quote from Shadow of the Wolf

“Water is dripping onto the floor somewhere near the cupboard, like the tick of a clock. It’s annoying because sometimes it comes when I’m expecting it and at other times it waits on purpose to irritate me.”
― Lindsey Barraclough, quote from Long Lankin

“And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”
― quote from While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement

“In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.

Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.

Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
...
The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others.

Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, quote from The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.