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Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things.”

“Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.”

“There were always well-developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them. One day led to the next, and it was much more easy to say he would wait until tomorrow. When that day arrived, he invariably postponed action until a more convenient time. Things had been going along in that easy way for almost a lifetime now; nevertheless,”

“He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.”

“She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have.”

“Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”

“Though it sometimes looks like a rich man will never help the poor; whereas the poor people will give away everything they has to help somebody who ain’t got nothing. That’s how it looks to me. Don’t seem like it ought to be that way, but I reckon the rich ain’t got no time to fool with us poor folks.”

“The spring-time ain’t going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That’s because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don’t see Him building durn cotton mills. That’s how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me.”

“He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.”

“He sometimes said it was partly his own fault, but he believed steadfastly that his position had been brought about by other people. He”

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