Roy Blount, Jr.

Writer

1941-10-04

Quotes by Roy Blount, Jr.

• The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

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• A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

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• People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

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• I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.

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• When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.

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• Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

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• English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

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