Quotes from Willie Morris

His claim to his home is deep, but there are too many ghosts. He must absorb without being absorbed.

His claim to his home is deep, but there are too many ghosts. He must absorb without being absorbed.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.

I can sometimes hear her music now, after thirty years -- and remember the leaves falling on some smoky autumn afternoon, the air crisp and the sounds of dogs barking, and train whistles far away.

The rugged, primitive hills sometimes soar to dizzying heights, then stretch downward into low-lying valleys and bottomlands where the cotton, soybeans, and corn have always prospered, and the splendid pines and hardwoods in both the hills and the bottoms lend a fine beauty to the hard earth.