Top 50 Daniel Woodrell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.”

— Daniel Woodrell

2. “This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.”

— Daniel Woodrell

3. “Ree needed often to inject herself with pleasant sounds, stab those sounds past the constant screeching, squalling hubbub regular life raised inside her spirit, poke the soothing sounds past that racket and down deep where her jittering soul paced on a stone slab in a gray room, agitated and endlessly provoked but yearning to hear something that might bring a moment’s rest.”

— Daniel Woodrell

4. “You got to be ready to die every day – then you got a chance.”

— Daniel Woodrell

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

— Daniel Woodrell

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

— Daniel Woodrell

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

— Daniel Woodrell

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

— Daniel Woodrell

9. “Nobody here wants to be awful,” he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. “It’s just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.”

— Daniel Woodrell

10. “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.”

— Daniel Woodrell

11. “It’s not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.”

— Daniel Woodrell

12. “I’d get lost without the weight of you two on my shoulders.”

— Daniel Woodrell

13. “Ice slipped from everything, limb, twig, stump, rock, and cascaded chinking to ground. Mist lifted from the bottoms to lie over the tracks but did not lift much above her head. Mist smeared like tears squashed on her cheeks.”

— Daniel Woodrell

14. “The opening novel of the ‘Bayou Trilogy’ was the first one I finished.”

— Daniel Woodrell

15. “The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”

— Daniel Woodrell

16. “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.”

— Daniel Woodrell

17. “Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.”

— Daniel Woodrell

18. “You know, I’m very near to bein’ normal, but I just can’t get over the hump.”

— Daniel Woodrell

19. “Grunt work is my main calling, but I like to be dead when I do it.”

— Daniel Woodrell

20. “I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.”

— Daniel Woodrell

21. “A person has to show some spirit – fate just about never shines on chickenshits.”

— Daniel Woodrell

22. “Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d overnight become glued to her spot.”

— Daniel Woodrell

23. “When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in the dirt until she felt China through her skin.”

— Daniel Woodrell

24. “When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.”

— Daniel Woodrell

25. “Ree followed a path made by prey uphill through scrub, across a bald knob and downhill into a section of pine trees and pine scent and that pious shade and silence pines create. Pine trees in low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.”

— Daniel Woodrell

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

— Daniel Woodrell

27. “I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.”

— Daniel Woodrell

28. “The going sun chucked a vast spread of red behind the ridgeline. A horizon of red light parsed into shafts by standing trees to throw pink in streaks across the valley snow.”

— Daniel Woodrell

29. “I’ve bumped into at least three people in town who all insist ‘Winter’s Bone’ is about them.”

— Daniel Woodrell

30. “I stood on the cedar deck for quite a spell, eye fuckin’ the night sky, trying to stare down the stars. Blood had crusted on my neck, back, in my hair, down the legs of my jeans, to where i was as spattered as a thumbless beef packer. I kept on with my close study of the higher reaches, fantasizing that a comet was due to streak by trailing a message only for me, spelled out clearly and printed huge. Some epigram from far away out there that’d clue me in on how to feel after killing a man.”

— Daniel Woodrell

31. “I pulled the rearview down and looked at myself in the mirror for a spell, trying to spot virtues.”

— Daniel Woodrell

32. “Honesty can siphon off a few regrets and resentments if you tap in to it. Let that sink in.”

— Daniel Woodrell

33. “The World Ain’t No Day-care Center.”

— Daniel Woodrell

34. “I didn’t really expect to be coming to the Oscars.”

— Daniel Woodrell

35. “This new spot for life might be but a short journey as a winged creature covers it, that is often said, but, oh, Lord, as you know, I had not the wings, and it is a hot, hard ride by road.”

— Daniel Woodrell

36. “When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.”

— Daniel Woodrell

37. “Before all that long, you start telling those near to you that you went on interviews that turned out sorry when factually you never even made the phone call.”

— Daniel Woodrell

38. “But I’ve been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.”

— Daniel Woodrell

39. “Tip began to nod, then shook his head. “I could be eight kinds of crooked, there, piglet, but I ain’t never been no kind of dumb.”

— Daniel Woodrell

40. “Violence had lost the personal touch, the pride had gone out of self-preservation, and mere chickenshit possibilities of improved technology replaced it.”

— Daniel Woodrell

41. “There’s an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction – a sweet spot there.”

— Daniel Woodrell

42. “You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin’ and you stay tough ‘til lights out – have you learned that?”

— Daniel Woodrell

43. “Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss.”

— Daniel Woodrell

44. “Can’t none of this be new to you.”

— Daniel Woodrell

45. “This floor, here? I remember when this floor here used to get to jumping’ like a fuckin’ bunny from all the dancing’. Everybody dancing’ around all night, stoned out of their minds – and it always was the happy kind of stoned back then.”

— Daniel Woodrell

46. “It was at this moment, chided by his old and present rival, that Shade decided it was time to revert to the shitkicker verities. Brazen dash, rough talk, and an ounce or two of mean were clearly required.”

— Daniel Woodrell

47. “I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.”

— Daniel Woodrell

48. “I sat there trying to avoid certain thoughts – the kind that’ll chew the meat clean out of your head if you open their cage.”

— Daniel Woodrell

49. “Ledoux’s face was pebbled with mosquito bites. Forget the Cutter’s and that means every needle-nose bug in the woods spare-changing you for blood like cornerboy hustlers spotting a strung-out Kennedy trying to score on Seventh. Like you got plenty to give.”

— Daniel Woodrell

50. “I felt like a number of things in me as a writer just clicked.”

— Daniel Woodrell