When an old lawyer in Franklin died and his office furnishings were being sold, Mother said to my father: "Cliff, if you can get those office chairs of his at fifty cents apiece, I want them." My father thought Mother was daft to want the homely old things, but she persisted, until all eight chairs were in our dining room. Recently a man who's a decorator came to my apartment in New York, with some friends. He saw two of the same chairs, which mother had sent me years ago in a generous truckload of furniture from home. "Where did you get those?" he asked, in the tone one would normally use to inquire after the crown jewels. I told him what I remembered of the original transaction, while he scrambled around the floor on his hands and knees, examining the chairs' bottoms.

"Hand-doweled," he muttered, lying with his chin hooked on a chair rung. "Too marvelous." He used a lot of other adjectives I've deliberately forgotten, due to the fact that decorators' phrases, if taken internally, have a tendency to make my stomach rumble. However, I do remember that he offered to buy the chairs at forty dollars apiece, whenever I felt like selling. "Early Pennsylvania Dutch," he said. "Practically museum pieces." Since then, I've viewed the chairs with proper respect, as a nest egg in case of emergency. Every free-lance writer needs a couple of early Pennsylvania Dutch chairs to fall back on.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

As a writer...

As a writer, I'm procrastinating and moody, with the added disadvantage that I have to think, or at least some editors expect me to think, which is equally debilitating. I am also hogtied by knowing at least a few of the rudiments and hazards of my profession, so I'm continually stuck with such artistic problems as "If the magazine said they want a thousand words, will they count 'a' and 'the'? And if I switch the first paragraph to the end and the last paragraph to the middle and the middle to the first, will that improve the story line?" But as an amateur painter, I merely keep going till the paper is covered with color. During the entire process-- about twenty minutes for a painting-- my most serious problem is: "Shall I wash the brush or make the dog purple, too?"

-- from "Look! I'm Framed" (1949)

Clonk, thud, a grrrr scraping sound as if some large, bony, inanimate object were being dragged against its will-- the noises finally seeped through her tight-woven concentration and took shape, as she sat working at her desk. She glanced up at the high ceiling thinking. Another one's found a mate.

-- from Open the Door (1966)

Of all her books, I think I like this one best, and so am a bit more reluctant to cut pieces loose from it for this website. This first paragraph is, for instance, genius-- simple on the face of it, but capturing everything that is to come near-complete in three quick sentences. Let me make explicit what every post in this blog implies-- you should read this woman's work. This would not be a bad place to start.

As Lucy Ramsdale said when the news reached her, "If Grace's papa could hear this, he wouldn't turn over in his grave-- he'd levitate."

--from A Dying Fall (1973)

Three years ago, when I first began painting as a hobby, I would say eagerly to strangers at parties, "You must come up and see my pictures sometime." The men to whom I addressed this invitation must have thought I was using a hand-colored variation of the old come-see-my-etchings line. Once in my apartment, they were startled to find I had been speaking literally. They were even more startled by the paintings. One or two callers recovered their voices enough to point and ask hoarsely. "wh-what's it supposed to be?" The others simply stood, like a one-man petrified forest, until they'd thought of some intelligent, critical comment, such as "Wow!" or "Wait till my analyst hears about this."

--from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)

Franklin, Pennsylvania, where I grew up and where my parents still live, is not an especially tolerant town, nestling as it does in the beautiful hilly region so rich in oil and old-line Republicans. During the oil boom in the last century, plenty of its citizens made lush fortunes and equally lush scandals almost overnight. Part of the money still remains above the surface, although spread rather thin over most of the population of ten thousand, and concentrated in only a few choice spots. As for the scandals, they've been decently buried by well-behaved descendants, and it would take a brave dog to dig up those juicy old bones.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The friend who told me about the onion cure for insomnia said she'd come across it while looking for a saw in Gimbel's basement. She had stopped to listen to a bald demonstrator giving a spiel about a potato peeler, and she insisted that he suddenly announced to his drifting audience, "If you have trouble sleeping at night, here's what you do." He told them to slice a large onion and make a sandwich with rye or whole-wheat bread. He warned them that white bread wouldn't do at all. This was to be taken with a glass of milk at bedtime. I asked whether the onion was to be peeled, because I was puzzled as to why a man demonstrating potato peelers would branch off into a cure for insomnia. My friend said no, not to peel the onion, just cut off a quarter-inch-thick slice with an ordinary kitchen knife. She said it had workwed miraculously for her. Her husband had complained that she reeked of onion clear across the bedroom; but she implied delicately that as I wasn't married, this was a technical drawback that needn't concern me.

from "Say 'Hemlock' and Flop"