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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I rejected the traditional notion of ‘women’s work,’ but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it – endlessly, day after day, season after season.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period – the Sixties – I rejected those things when I went north.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I suppose the desire to go to town helped make me ambitious, and the allure of the worlds that came in over the radio also helped. But the rewards of growing up on a farm were far greater in many ways than life in town.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood – I made it into a mystery story.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

My father had all these great names for our cows. Bossy and Daisy and Petunia and Turnip. One of my jobs was to round up the cows before milking. I’d go out back with the dog and bring them in.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, ‘In Country,’ which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I like to play with words and the sounds of words – that’s extremely important to me.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I’m not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don’t talk.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Since ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I often say flippantly that the short story is… shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It’s much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

‘In Country’ is about a high school girl’s quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn’t have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It’s a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

I have heard from many readers since ‘The Girl in the Blue Beret’ came out. The story of my airline pilot, former B-17 bomber pilot Marshall Stone, on his search to find the people who helped him during World War II has struck a chord.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes.

– Bobbie Ann Mason

It was important for me to understand who I am and where I came from. To get a hold on why I do certain things.

– Bobbie Ann Mason