Mudbound Quotes

What we can't speak, we say in silence.

This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along.

The truth isn't so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.

That's what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.

Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right.

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.

There's a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.

You got to go along to get along.

How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.

It wasn’t just that he loved her; it was that he loved her, in particular.

She reached out and stroked my hair just as she had when I was a child. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me, feeling utterly safe.

[He] had a hole in his soul, the kind the devil loves to find. It's like an open doorway for him, lets him enter in and do his wicked work.

When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can't expect no sense from her. She'll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain't in her way. That's the Lord's doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain't around to do it most of the time. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can't help but look after that child.

I give whatever I can these days, and not just out of guilt or duty. That's what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must.

...like the way a child hankers for a holly berry. He don't know it's poison, he just sees something pretty and red and he wants it in his mouth...There's a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.

I talked to her just like I talk to a laboring woman. Mothers need to hear them soothing words. They just as important as the medicines, sometimes even more.

I had a few pricks of conscience- seeing Henry's pajama bottoms hanging forlornly from a peg in our bedroom, his comb on he dresser, a stray white hair on his pillow- but real shame and regret were absent. In their place was a riotous sense of wonder. I'd never imagined myself capable of either great boldness or great passion, and the discovery that I had reservoirs of both astounded me.

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I am Born," you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn't say, so we're left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who'd been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner's where she'd gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather's nursemaid's husband's future mistress's hat needed adornment.

When the river takes me I don't try to swim or stay afloat. I open my eyes and my mouth and let the water fill me up. I feel my lungs spasm but there's no pain, and I stop being afraid. The current carries me along. I'm flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I've ever been.

It wasn't her fault if she seemed less than human, it was the fault of them that did this to her, and them that didn't raise a voice against it.

The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose. I’ll begin with that. With love.

Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that.

Florence may have sensed something, but I had no idea of what I was setting in motion the day I gave Ronsel Jackson a lift from town.

I loved all my children, but I loved Ronsel the most. If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place.

There’s a whole lot of evil in the world looks pretty on the outside.

Daddy shook Pappy's hand, then Henry's, then hugged the children. At last he turned to me. Softly, in a voice meant for my ears along, he said, "When you were a year old and you came down with rubella, the doctor told us you were likely to die of it. Said he didn't expect you'd live another forty-eight hours. Your mother was frantic, but I told her that doctor didn't know what he was talking about. Our Laura's a fighter, I said, and she's going to be just fine. I never doubted it, not for one minute, then or since. You keep that in your pocket and take it out when you need it, hear?

Jamie didn't talk to me about the war. Most men don't, who've seen real combat. It's the ones who spent their tours well behind the lines who want to tell you all about it, and the ones who never served who want to know.

The Bible is full of thou-shalt-nots. Thou shalt not kill, that's one. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, that's two. Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife - three and four. Notice how none of them have any loopholes. There are no dependent clauses you can hang your sins on, like: Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife, unless thou art wandering in the blackest hell, lost to yourself and to every memory of light and goodness, and uncovering her nakedness is the only way back to yourself. No, the Bible's absolute when it comes to most things. It's why I don't believe in God. Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong. Sometimes it's the only way to make things right. Any God who doesn't understand that can go fuck Himself. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain - that's five.

You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” “Only so long as he alive,” I said. “For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans.

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect...

Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It's in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman they's itching for. White men already got her, they thinking, You mine now, just wait and see what I'm gone do to you. Colored men ain't got her and ain't never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her.

You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone to let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone to send Florence and Lilly Mae to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying there half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you.

If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. . . . And yet no one accused men of being improper or encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything.

FIRST TIME I LAID eyes on Laura McAllan she was out of her head with mama worry. When that mama worry takes ahold of a woman you can’t expect no sense from her. She’ll do or say anything at all and you just better hope you ain’t in her way. That’s the Lord’s doing right there. He made mothers to be like that on account of children need protecting and the men ain’t around to do it most of the time. Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his daddy gone be off somewhere else. Helping that child be up to the mama. But God never gives us a task without giving us the means to see it through. That mama worry come straight from Him, it make it so she can’t help but look after that child. Every once in awhile you see a mother who ain’t got it, who just don’t care for her own baby that came out of her own body. And you try and get her to hold that baby and feed that baby but she won’t have none of it. She just staring off, letting that baby lay there and cry, letting other people do for it. And you know that poor child gone grow up wrong-headed, if it grows up at all.

Una vez que a Hap se le mete algo en la cabeza, es ciego y sordo a todo lo que no case con su idea. Eso es lo que hace de él tan buen predicador, que su fe jamás se tambalea.

would also give me time to work on my wife, who I knew would be reluctant to leave Memphis.

never trusted my brother-in-law, or any man comfortable in a suit.

Virgil was a great drinker and a great talker besides, and those are stains enough on anybody’s character, but what sort of man ends his life with no thought for the shame and misfortune his actions will bring upon his family? He left my sister flat broke and my nephew and nieces fatherless. If he hadn’t already been dead, I would have killed him myself.

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. . . . A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. —JAMES AGEE, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

When I looked at my children I could see me and Hap in all of em. And I loved my husband and myself too, and so I loved our children. But when I looked at Ronsel I seen something more, something me and Hap couldn't a gave him cause we ain't got it. A shine so bright it hurt your eyes sometimes but you still had to look at it. I loved all my children, but I loved Ronsel the most. If that was a sin I reckoned God would forgive me for it, seeing as how He the one stacked the cards in the first place.

When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patched across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown. When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker.

Henry was wholly preoccupied with the farm. I would have gotten more notice from him if I’d grown a tail and started to bray.

What we can’t speak, we say in silence.

I knew their kind: locked in the imagined glory of the past, scared of losing what they thought was theirs.

With the cruel natural order that had made me simultaneously undesirable to men and unable to feel complete without one.

Delta’ll take a woman like that and suck all the sap out of her till there ain’t nothing left but bone and grudge, against him that brung her here and the land that holds him and her with him.

I never got falling-down drunk, just maintained a nice steady infusion throughout the day. A lot of it I sweated out. The rest I put to use. I was the designated charmer of the household, the one responsible for keeping everybody else’s spirits up. To play my part I needed booze. I

The current carries me along. I’m flotsam, and I understand that flotsam is all I’ve ever been. Something

Something bad happen to a child, you can be sure his daddy gone be off somewhere else.