Mudbound Quotes
"Every time I guess wrong the water rises another foot."
"If you ever have to be a soldier, promise me you'll try and get up to the sky."
"Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose."
"I was a thirty-one-year-old virgin when I met Henry McAllan."
"They say it's patriotic to die for your country. Well, let's see how many patriots we can make out of those German bastards."
"You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive."
"This is land I've got. Do you know why? This is land I've got. Do you know why?"
"You can put your faith in a whole lot of things—in God, in money, in other people—but land’s the only thing you can count on to be there tomorrow. It’s the only thing that’s really yours."
"Rebuild and replant: that’s what farmers do in the Delta."
"A Negro is like a little child, when he tries to lie it’s stamped on his face plain as day."
"Whatever else the colored man may be, he’s our brother."
"A woman will make her feelings known one way or another."
"Violence is part and parcel of country life."
"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
"A cripple can’t make a crop, and a one-legged man ain’t good for much of anything at all."
"Farming’s a business, Laura. And like any business, it carries risks."
"That’s what I’m gone do: I’m gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of."
"It’s a long story. Why don’t you set down and eat and I’ll tell you all about it."
"Ain’t never a lull or a cease-fire. Win today, you got to get up tomorrow and fight the same battles all over again."
"You’re back in Mississippi now, and you better start remembering it."
"It wasn’t personal. The Jerries were the enemy, and while I tried to account for as many as I could, I didn’t hate them. Not till the twenty-ninth of April 1945."
"I’d smelled plenty of corpses. About a mile later we came to a compound fenced all around by a concrete wall, looked like a regular military post from the outside."
"I heard one of the guys retching behind me."
"Some of them were still alive and they were crawling over the dead ones, trying to get out."
"Her weight on me was light as a blanket, so light she was hardly there at all."
"I looked back down at her, the woman I’d just killed with a chocolate bar."
"In Mississippi I was just another nigger pushing a plow."
"I sent her a few letters but she never wrote back, and after awhile I just let it go."
"I was real sweet on her, even thought about marrying her."
"Some women get like that, hard times just pares them down till all that’s left is their beauty."
"And just like me, Resl was hungry to be treated like a human being."
"Me loving a white woman, he might’ve come around to that, though he would’ve told me I was a damn fool."
"And when the war was over and he didn’t come home, them marks didn’t tell me why."
"Ronsel was always after me to learn how to read but I don’t see the point of it myself."
"But there’s a old word that goes, 'Be careful what you wish for or you might just get it.'"
"God answered all my prayers. He sent my son home safe and with enough money for a new mule too."
"And best of all, to share my joyful news, once Dr. Brownlee had confirmed it, with all of them, and be the object of their tender fussing."
"I never felt more in love with my husband than when I was carrying his children."
"I felt a twinge of guilt at that, but not nearly enough to make myself say, 'I’m not going after all, not without you.'"
"My pregnancy had completely healed the breach between Henry and me, unraveling our anger and knitting us back together again."
"It had been so long since I’d smelled the ocean and immersed myself in that cool bluegreen."
"Jamie hadn’t come home. He was in Rome."
"Jamie was a big help to me. He threw himself into every task I gave him, never once complaining about the work or the heat."
"Jamie did flirt with me plenty, but he flirted with everybody, even the men."
"He liked to win people. That makes it sound like a game, and perhaps to a certain type of man it is, but Jamie was no rake."
"I ran the soap across my body and wondered: as he was building the shower, had he imagined me in it like this, naked and free under the darkening sky?"
"Just sweat. You know, the odor that comes from a person’s body when they do work of some kind?"
"I’ll tell you one thing, it better not have been that nigger."
"Jamie’s eyes flickered to me. I shook my head slightly."
"I’m asking you to stay a little longer."
"He never forgets a slight, or forgives one."
"I have to, Laura. Henry’s right about one thing, I need to make a new start."
"When he was finished he popped his head in the front window."
"I’ve belied a lady, the princess of this country."
"Ain’t good to mess with the married gals."
"You gonna come after me with your cane?"
"I can’t wait to have him all to myself, eh gal?"
"It’s what makes him a good preacher, his faith never wobbles."
"I’ve seen the way you sniff after Jamie like a sow in rut."
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
"You gonna betray your own blood over a nigger?"
"Don’t come any closer. I’m warning you."
"If you kill him, you better kill me too."
"I’ll go fetch some water and a clean cloth."
"It looks like he went peacefully, in his sleep."
"Let the tenants know there’s a storm coming."
"I need to fetch the ladder and see to the roof."
"Don’t be silly. He’s just sore at you over the Ronsel business."
"Sit up and act like a man," he hissed in my ear.
No need to do anything," said Pappy. "He won’t talk, he told you so already. Ain’t that right, son?
"What do you fellows care about some Kraut whore?" I said.
What’s it gonna be?" said Turpin. "His eyes, his tongue, his hands or his balls? Choose, nigger lover.
"What I need, I have right here," she said.
"Maybe I’ll go to Hollywood and get a screen test," he said with a laugh.
"We’ll get a house in town after the harvest," I blurted out.
"It’s Mississippi. There doesn’t have to be a reason."
"What we can’t speak, we say in silence."
"That’s what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must."