Top 30 John Berendt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.”

— John Berendt

2. “Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.”

— John Berendt

3. “Keep a diary, but don’t just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end – as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It’s great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.”

— John Berendt

4. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,’ he wrote. ‘Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

— John Berendt

5. “Dr. Irving Stone of the Institute for Forensic Sciences in Dallas. He’s the guy who analyzed the clothing worn by President Kennedy and Governor Connally for the congressional committee that reexamined the Kennedy assassination.”

— John Berendt

6. “Loneliness is not being alone, It’s loving others to no avail.”

— John Berendt

7. “Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. Time.”

— John Berendt

8. “Jim Williams’s guilt or innocence is no longer the issue,” he said. “Spencer Lawton’s incompetence is the issue.”

— John Berendt

9. “By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.”

— John Berendt

Featured in: Strong Quotes

10. “How do you do that?” I asked. “What do witches eat?” “Witches loves pork meat,” she said. “They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don’t care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches.” The.”

— John Berendt

11. “We’re not at all like the rest of Georgia. We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, ‘What’s your business?’ In Macon they ask, ‘Where do you go to church?’ In Augusta they ask your grandmother’s maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is ‘What would you like to drink?”

— John Berendt

12. “For me, Savannah’s resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.”

— John Berendt

13. “Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.”

— John Berendt

14. “That you are a worldly adult,’ she said. ‘You have spent your whole life letting go of the innocent dreams that made your childhood so warm and hopeful and full of certainty. Dream by dream you let them go. We all do it, to shield ourselves from disappointment. It’s easy to shed them. Not so easy to get them back.”

— John Berendt

15. “Don’t you feel cut off?” I asked. “Cut off from what?” she replied. “No, on the whole I’d say we rather enjoy our separateness.”

— John Berendt

16. “You mustn’t be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias. There’s more to Savannah than that. Things can get very murky.”

— John Berendt

17. “The tides surged through the marsh and each wave that hit the beach came light-struck and broad-shouldered, with all the raw power the moon could bestow.”

— John Berendt

18. “The megaselling books by celebrities are not so much books as products.”

— John Berendt

19. “By all appearances, the shooting had been self-defense or, at worst, a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. Matters like these were traditionally settled quietly, especially when the accused was a highly respected, affluent individual with no criminal record. Savannahians were well aware of past killings in which well-connected suspects were never charged, no matter how obvious their guilt.”

— John Berendt

20. “Chigarid. The man who.”

— John Berendt

21. “Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink.”

— John Berendt

22. “Walls of thick vegetation rose up on all sides and arched overhead in a lacy canopy that filtered the light to a soft shade. It had just rained; the air was hot and steamy. I felt enclosed in a semitropical terrarium, sealed off from a world that suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.”

— John Berendt

23. “Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.”

— John Berendt

24. “We’re a very cousiny people,” Mary Harty told me. “One must tread very lightly here: Everyone is kin to everyone else.”

— John Berendt

25. “Death in Venice, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers, Don’t Look Now, Summertime, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Comfort of Strangers.”

— John Berendt

26. “What was your name before that?” I asked. “Frank,” she said.”

— John Berendt

27. “These, then, were the images in my mental gazetteer of Savannah: rum-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words, and lovely music. That and the beauty of the name itself: Savannah.”

— John Berendt

28. “Nothing can be said, including this statement, that has not been said before.”

— John Berendt

29. “From the outset, he had assumed that his word as a gentleman would be accepted and that the whole affair would be settled quietly, the way Savannah had settled past incidents involving prominent suspects.”

— John Berendt

30. “He was a motion study in energy and turbulence, never looking right or left or acknowledging the presence of other people on the street, except on one occasion that she vividly recalled.”

— John Berendt

31. “It ain’t braggin’ if y’really done it.”

— John Berendt

32. “We thought it proved Savannah was cosmopolitan, that we were sophisticated enough to accept a gay man socially.”

— John Berendt