Best 44 quotes of Brenda Sutton Rose on MyQuotes

Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.

A real musician ain’t gonna choose his own guitar like an evil master choosing his slave. The guitar will choose his master and when he does, you’ll know it.

Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.

As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face leathered, and his heart throbbed with music.

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they’ve ever known.

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.

A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.

At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.

By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised. My mother is still warm.

Farm labor had stained his hands, but music stained his heart.

He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back. With the coach clocking him, Kevin took flight, his feet hitting the ground and pulling back with tremendous speed. Demons--visions of the eager hands of pretty boys with firm bodies--chased him, chipping away at the space separating them, their claws a whisper away from his flesh. He ran until he felt his lungs would give out; like a madman he ran.

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

I come here for the solitude. I come to soak myself in memories before they evaporate, before they float so far from my memory that I can't catch them.

I could go to a dozen houses, scrape away the dirt, and find his footprints, but my own prints evaporated before I ever looked back.

If he could do one thing, he could run. He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back.

I know this place like I know the calluses on my hands.

I’m not made for city streets. My brogans drop soil from the field behind me, each grain of dirt like a seed revealing who I am. My heart belongs in the country. I’m a farmer, and I was shaped in the fields.

I seek him in the landscape of home, in the breeze brushing over rows of crops. I seek him in the seasons of planting and harvesting. A rugged man of the earth, he breathed life into this farm.

Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it's yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey.

My calloused hands tell the story of my life. I’ve loved these fields more than a man can love anything outside his family. I’m a farmer. Engrave it on my headstone: Farmer.

My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name

My mother’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me.

No matter where I go, I’ll never forget home. I can feel its heartbeat a thousand miles away. Home is the place where I grew my wings.

She struts into the hair salon, her mouth filled with a rotten egg of gossip, unshelled, filled with decay. As soon as she sits down she bites into the shell, and the stink of her lies fills the air, its goo dripping down her chin. With her new haircut she exits, leaving behind the putrid evidence that she’s as corrupt as the egg of lies she spread.

Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.

So that I might face my past, I dug these words from the richest southern soil and held them in my hands like seeds waiting for rain.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

The guitar breathed. It inhaled and exhaled, and music filled the shop as the instrument picked the heartbreak of generations.

The place cast a spell on me, a lovely spell that seduced me one one breath at a time.

There are parents who use their small children as weapons. They are weak people. Sick people. And their children are watching them, watching how Mom and Dad use them as weapons.

There are times when a day from my childhood comes to me, swirls around me, teases me as I try to catch the memory in my hands, as I try to catch the scents, the sounds, the warmth of the sun on my young face. In bare feet, I reach for it, the memory that is. I reach for summer nights, playing chase, reach across a thousand miles to the comfort of my father’s voice, to the rush of heat when my mother opens the oven to check on the baking, reach toward the rush of laughter, toward home, toward the glory days of my youth. The only way to catch an elusive memory is to open my heart and swallow it whole. When I die, I’ll be stuffed full of memories, too many to fit into a casket.

There are times when a time from my childhood comes to me, swirls around me, teases me as I try to catch the memory in my hands, as I try to catch the scents, the sounds, the warmth of the sun on my young face. In bare feet, I reach for it, the memory that is. I reach for summer nights, playing chase, reach across a thousand miles to the comfort of my father’s voice, to the rush of heat when my mother opens the oven to check on the baking, reach toward the rush of laughter, toward home, toward the glory days of my youth. The only way to catch an elusive memory is to open my heart and swallow it whole. When I die, I’ll be stuffed full of memories, too many to fit into a casket.

There’s secrets hiding inside this six-string just waitin’ for somebody to find ‘em and turn ‘em into music.

The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults.

The wind whirls and whistles and strip pink blooms from the mimosas, scatters twigs, broken limbs, pine needles and pine cones across our yard, and robs the pecan trees of a thousand leaves. The storm eventually dies, but the bruised trees continue to weep into the night, still shimmering with dewy leaves when the sun comes up the next morning.

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.

To lose the simple years of your life is to lose your soul. Some say don’t look back, but if there is love and laughter behind you, look homeward from time to time. Draw strength from your mistakes, your accomplishments, your losses, your awkward years, your unanswered prayers. Draw strength from the magnificent landscape of your youth.

To write with truth, I’ve been known to slow dance my words over graves of buried prayers, to drink my words under the shadow of my grandfather’s whiskey bottles, to lift my words from under the gaze of my daddy’s gentle eyes. I’ve had to write from the seeding syllables of my gardens, from the ammunition of my ancestors’ battlegrounds, and from the misery of my families’ tattered Bibles. I’ve pulled stories from the soil of my homeplace, from the juice stains of freshly-picked blackberries, and from the bottom of my bare feet. I write with the barbed-wire nouns and plural verbs of my mistakes, with the cast iron consonants and silent sugary vowels of my mother’s kitchen. But in the end, the only thing that matters is that I write.

When a man's running, he seldom looks back.

When his wounds cut too deep for the blues--when he couldn't sing himself out of his own sorrow--when he was too wounded to shimmy his fingers over piano keys--he came to the healing waters of the Alapaha River. And on the river he recounted his sins, confessing to the ancient rhythmic flow of the current. Communion.

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze.

Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if is the truth as long as it really happened.

Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if it is the truth as long as it really happened.