Top 50 Ron Rash Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A small profit is better than a big loss.”

— Ron Rash

2. “One thing’s sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children.”

— Ron Rash

3. “I think that’s what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.”

— Ron Rash

4. “But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don’t need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”

— Ron Rash

5. “It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start.”

— Ron Rash

6. “Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?”

— Ron Rash

7. “You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, things got narrow real quick.”

— Ron Rash

8. “Don’t love anything that can be taken away.”

— Ron Rash

9. “Spend a long time alone, especially if you’re someone who’s never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.”

— Ron Rash

10. “What I’ve become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you’d rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself – if I’m not going be able to write, I’m not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.”

— Ron Rash

11. “A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn’t continue to exist in the world.”

— Ron Rash

12. “Do this one thing.”

— Ron Rash

13. “Nietzsche once said “that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” I didn’t believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate – and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness.”

— Ron Rash

14. “Peter Geye has rendered the Minnesota north shore in all its stark, dangerous beauty, and it is the perfect backdrop for this deeply moving story of conflict and forgiveness. Safe from the Sea is a remarkable debut.”

— Ron Rash

15. “I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That’s where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.”

— Ron Rash

16. “I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.”

— Ron Rash

17. “We had some good times at school. I didn’t know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that’s the way of it.”

— Ron Rash

18. “Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?”

— Ron Rash

19. “He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.”

— Ron Rash

20. “I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for Serena.”

— Ron Rash

21. “So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth.”

— Ron Rash

22. “A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female’s caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.”

— Ron Rash

23. “Like Flannery O’Connor, McCorkle’s genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South’s greatest writers; she is also one of America’s.”

— Ron Rash

24. “Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn’t be found, shacks where families lived who didn’t even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.”

— Ron Rash

25. “Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present’s surface.”

— Ron Rash

26. “He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way,” Aunt Margaret said. “Your momma knows that.” But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expressed.”

— Ron Rash

27. “I guess sometimes you’ve got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.”

— Ron Rash

28. “Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better.”

— Ron Rash

29. “Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.”

— Ron Rash

30. “You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender’s sole advantage.”

— Ron Rash

31. “I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.”

— Ron Rash

32. “One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I’m thinking is maybe it’s time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or wathever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn’t working.”

— Ron Rash

33. “I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe’s house. I’d planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The.”

— Ron Rash

34. “Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.”

— Ron Rash

35. “One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.”

— Ron Rash

36. “I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I’ve always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story’s larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.”

— Ron Rash

37. “Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child.”

— Ron Rash

38. “Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in ‘The Trusty’ was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.”

— Ron Rash

39. “I wouldn’t mind being a track and field coach.”

— Ron Rash

40. “Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.”

— Ron Rash

41. “I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, ’cause it was the first time that I hadn’t just entered a book, but a book had entered me.”

— Ron Rash

42. “He couldn’t imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena’s beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable.”

— Ron Rash

43. “My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I’d read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She’d loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book’s main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don’t get it.”

— Ron Rash

44. “Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.”

— Ron Rash

45. “She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did.”

— Ron Rash

46. “My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one’s personal failures.”

— Ron Rash

47. “He’d felt incredibly lucky they’d found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn’t mere good fortune but inevitability.”

— Ron Rash

48. “I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn’t something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish it otherwise.”

— Ron Rash

49. “As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.”

— Ron Rash

50. “The world lies all before us.”

— Ron Rash