Top 70 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

2. “It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

3. “A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn’t.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

4. “I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

5. “Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man’s mind.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

6. “Words began fights and words ended them.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

7. “It is not that death comes, but that life leaves.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

8. “Magic birds were dancing in the mystic marsh. The grass swayed with them, and the shallow waters, and the earth fluttered under them. The earth was dancing with the cranes, and the low sun, and the wind and sky.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

9. “Here in Florida the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing, making no rustle in their passing.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

10. “We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

11. “It seemed a strange thing to him, when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines should grow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river there grew magnolias. Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mules and horses. But trees were different in different places.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

12. “Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

13. “Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

14. “I had done battle with a great fear and the victory was mine.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

15. “It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

16. “Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

17. “He who tries to forget a woman, never loved her.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

18. “Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

19. “Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

20. “A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

21. “Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

22. “He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

23. “Grandma Hutto’s flower garden was a bright patchwork quilt thrown down inside the pickets.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

24. “Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

25. “He lay down beside the fawn. He put one arm across its neck. It did not seem to him that he could ever be lonely again.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

26. “No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

27. “But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

28. “You can’t change a man, no-ways. By the time his mummy turns him loose and he takes up with some innocent woman and marries her, he’s what he is.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

29. “It occurred to him that the increasing patience of age was as great a myth as the unalloyed joy of youth. The longer he lived, the less tolerance he had for the patently evil.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

30. “The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

31. “Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

32. “A man’ll seem like a person to a woman, year in, year out. She’ll put up and she’ll put up. Then one day he’ll do something maybe no worse than what he’s been a-doing all his life. She’ll look at him. And without no warning he’ll look like a varmint.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

33. “It is not death that kills us, but life. We are done to death by life.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

34. “The wild animals seemed less predatory to him than people he had known.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

35. “Some of the books that provided the richest fare were hidden under unrevealing names, like a rare soul behind a drab face.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

36. “It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one’s own world, as when any foreign country is visited.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

37. “It’s very important to be just to other people. It takes years and years of living to learn that injustice against oneself is always unimportant.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

38. “Life is strong stuff, some of us can bear more of it than others.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

39. “No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

40. “They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

41. “Living was no longer the grief behind him, but the anxiety ahead.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

42. “Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

43. “The individual man is transitory, but the pulse of life and of growth goes on after he is gone, buried under a wreath of magnolia leaves.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

44. “He had perhaps been bruised too often. The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence. Something in him was raw and tender. The touch of men was hurtful upon it, but the touch of pines was healing.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

45. “I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

46. “His father had never planted an orchard. No growing thing was graceless, but that scowling, snarling man, Hiram Linden, had seemed purposely to avoid all crops that flowered in beauty. All were utilitarian, sown with surliness and harvested with oaths. Ase was the first Linden of three generations to consider the earth and its bounty with reverence and affection, to long to adorn it as best he might during his tenure.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

47. “Two elements enter into successful and happy gatherings at table. The food, whether simple or elaborate, must be carefully prepared; willingly prepared; imaginatively prepared. And the guests – friends, family or strangers – must be conscious of their welcome.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

48. “Penny’s bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more that his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood. And if, on a soft day in April, the boy had prowled away on his boy’s business, he could understand the thing that had drawn him. He understood, too, its briefness.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

49. “The best fish in the world are of course those one catches oneself.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

50. “You kin tame arything, son, excusin’ the human tongue.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings