Explore Quotes by Daniel Woodrell

In February of 1972, a snowstorm blew into Kansas City, and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

I said shut up once already, with my mouth.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, 'You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.'

The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.

Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.