Crooked Letter Quotes.

1. "Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?"
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

2. "Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

3. "The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

4. "Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook." But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

5. "...in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves..."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

6. "At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

7. "He was tired of having only three channels."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

8. "Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

9. "all monsters were misunderstood."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter

10. "He found the first skipped meals were the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn't know how hungry you were, how empty you'd become. Wallace's visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it."
- Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter