Top 35 Brenda Sutton Rose Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are parents who use their small children as weapons. They are weak people. Sick people. And their children are watching them, watching how Mom and Dad use them as weapons.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

2. “This land pulses with life. It breathes in me; it breathes around me; it breathes in spite of me. When I walk on this land, I am walking on the heartbeat of the past and the future. And that’s only one of the reasons I am a farmer.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

3. “I come here for the solitude. I come to soak myself in memories before they evaporate, before they float so far from my memory that I can’t catch them.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

4. “During my childhood, I saw at least ten thousand fireflies shimmering their amber lights in the darkness and never once longed to dissect a single one to discover the source of its magic. I’m older now, my youth behind me, and fireflies continue to fill me with the joy of childhood. I refuse to dissect their magic. We all need a miracle or two or three to cling to, and I will always cling to the miracle of fireflies on a summer’s night.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

5. “Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

6. “No matter where I go, I’ll never forget home. I can feel its heartbeat a thousand miles away. Home is the place where I grew my wings.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

7. “Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it’s yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

8. “The guitar breathed. It inhaled and exhaled, and music filled the shop as the instrument picked the heartbreak of generations.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

9. “I know this place like I know the calluses on my hands.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

10. “The guitar poured out its soul, its history, its dreams, its pain, its victories, its secrets. The guitar’s strings purred with blues and ended with a haunting solitary song with no lyrics.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

11. “I seek him in the landscape of home, in the breeze brushing over rows of crops. I seek him in the seasons of planting and harvesting. A rugged man of the earth, he breathed life into this farm.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

12. “I’m not made for city streets. My brogans drop soil from the field behind me, each grain of dirt like a seed revealing who I am. My heart belongs in the country. I’m a farmer, and I was shaped in the fields.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

13. “When his wounds cut too deep for the blues – when he couldn’t sing himself out of his own sorrow – when he was too wounded to shimmy his fingers over piano keys – he came to the healing waters of the Alapaha River. And on the river he recounted his sins, confessing to the ancient rhythmic flow of the current. Communion.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

14. “Kevin knew he had to always outrun the enemy inside him, and if that meant playing football, he’d do it. During puberty, he had taken off running and found too late that he couldn’t stop. In dreams that turned into nightmares he ran in fear, ripped from sleep in a sweat, shouting,“Run!”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

15. “Although I wasn’t there to bear witness, I imagine Lot’s wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

16. “Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

17. “There’s secrets hiding inside this six-string just waitin’ for somebody to find ’em and turn ’em into music.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

18. “I write books with words. Numerous words. Words that stomp and stare and crush and collapse and boogie and bang and scream and laugh and manipulate. My books are a storehouse of words that form paragraphs that form chapters that form stories that form thoughts that live on long after you’ve read the last word.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

19. “Sometimes we need to be knocked down so we can experience the getting up.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

20. “When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

21. “At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers – all bridge players – stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton’s cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

22. “Farm labor had stained his hands, but music stained his heart.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

23. “Jasmine felt a sense of power in cooking. It was she who controlled the ingredients, she who controlled the menus, and she who controlled the fragrances that filled her home.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

24. “If he could do one thing, he could run. He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

25. “I asked about the price of the guitars, reminding him that if expected me to man the cash register, I’d need to know what to charge. He told me, ‘There ain’t no set price on these babies. Take what the customer offers you. Even if it’s his soul.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

26. “As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face leathered, and his heart throbbed with music.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

27. “These babies ain’t just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

28. “I could go to a dozen houses, scrape away the dirt, and find his footprints, but my own prints evaporated before I ever looked back.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

29. “Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if is the truth as long as it really happened.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

30. “When I was a young, fireflies were as magical to me as a rare southern snow, newborn puppies, and a full moon. Back then, fireflies came in masses, filling the nearby brush and woods with the golden-green glow of something elusive and mysterious.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

31. “The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

32. “A part of him died slowly, and the other part died overnight.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

33. “He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back. With the coach clocking him, Kevin took flight, his feet hitting the ground and pulling back with tremendous speed. Demons – visions of the eager hands of pretty boys with firm bodies – chased him, chipping away at the space separating them, their claws a whisper away from his flesh. He ran until he felt his lungs would give out; like a madman he ran.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

34. “A real musician ain’t gonna choose his own guitar like an evil master choosing his slave. The guitar will choose his master and when he does, you’ll know it.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

35. “Carrying the need to bow down and seek solace at the altar of nature, he had launched the canoe in the darkness. Tonight, his altar was the Alapaha River.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

36. “Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

37. “When a man’s running, he seldom looks back.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

38. “We don’t plant trees like we used to. A yard without trees is a yard without a future. It might as well be a cemetery.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

39. “A swift rhythm is played out by my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many, the meter and rhythm of stringing is the only poetry they’ve ever known.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose