Kaye Gibbons Quotes

United States, Novelist
May 5, 1960

Kaye Gibbons is an American novelist. Her first novel, Ellen Foster (1987), received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gibbons is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two of her books, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, were selected for Oprah's Book Club in 1998.

Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?

Kaye Gibbons
- World
- Important
- Like
I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.

Kaye Gibbons
- Good
- Looking
- Automobile

You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.

Kaye Gibbons
- Time
- Enough
- Stories
Mothers smell blood before the wound is given. We see the rent place on the child's arm before the arrow strikes.

Kaye Gibbons
- Children
- Mother
- Wounds
That's all my grandfather was guilty of, fear, faith in his words, but that was a high crime in her eyes. That's all Jack was guilty of that day, but I've lived with him a good while and I believe I understand him. Sometimes it might take an afternoon or evening of being here in this kitchen alone, thinking, but I can usually come to see his reasons through his ways. And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don't you believe it to be so?

Kaye Gibbons
I am a great believer in variations on the routine.

Kaye Gibbons
You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him.

Kaye Gibbons
- Enough
- Point
- Thousand
I might be confused sometimes in my head but it is not something you need to talk about. Before you can talk you have to line it all up in order and I had rather just let it swirl around until I am too tired to think. You just let the motion in your head wear you out. Never think about it. You just make a bigger mess that way.

Kaye Gibbons
- Thinking
- Sometimes
- Needs

The fact that he had foamed at the mouth immediately upon dying, indicated that he had a great back jam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken...out bubbled all the words he had swallowed when he was alive.

Kaye Gibbons
- Desire
- Wish
- Dying