Best 17 quotes of Edward P. Jones on MyQuotes

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.

I'm fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.

Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn't seem to exist for me.

We are all worthy of one another.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you cant be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

As for the absence of recovery, as for death, there are machines that are not meant for the road.

But my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be.

(Her husband's departure ...) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity. From "Butterfly on F street

People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one's still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like [James] Baldwin, who live in the world of words.

The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

They treat colored people like kings and queens in Washington, cause thas where the president lives. Would they treat colored people anything but good in a city where the president hangs his hat and pets his dog and snores besides Mrs. President every night? Now would they?

We leave, we run away and don't realize how much we'll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It's the worst mama in the world and it's the best mama in the world.

What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he's doing.