Willie Morris

“He was more than a dog. He was a presence.”

“A town is a place where there are no strangers.”

“To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

“The best thing about a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does.”

“The South is a land of ghosts.”

“What a place the South is, not a place at all, but a mood.”

“For a writer, memory is everything. It is the well from which we draw our stories.”

“The days were ours, the nights too, and the woods and the river.”

“Words are the only things that last forever.”

“A good dog is one of the finest things a boy can have.”

“In the South, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our home in dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, childhood afternoon.”

“Life is a series of dogs.”

“The landscape of one's childhood is the most important landscape of all.”

“We were all that we had, and it was enough.”

“The past is a living thing.”