Free Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far Creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days, so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

— Daniel Woodrell

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

— Daniel Woodrell

I FELL DEEP down in there, until this bright light raised me from sleep. Coming out of a pit such as that, you think the bright light could be God or a cop on patrol.

— Daniel Woodrell

I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.

— Daniel Woodrell

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

— Daniel Woodrell

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

— Daniel Woodrell

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

— Daniel Woodrell

I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won’t say I rested.

— Daniel Woodrell

I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.

— Daniel Woodrell

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

— Daniel Woodrell