Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

A real musician ain’t going to choose his own guitar like an evil master choosing his slave. The guitar will choose his master and when he does, you’ll know it.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

As he farmed, hard labor left his hands callused, the sun bleached his hair, his face feathered, and his heart throbbed with music.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they’ve ever known.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

A song rises up from the belly of my pa stand rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised. My mother is still warm.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.

— Brenda Sutton Rose

I could go to a dozen houses, scrape away the dirt, and find his footprints, but my own prints evaporated before I ever looked back.

— Brenda Sutton Rose