I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what it symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

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

But like Brady, Mather was no see-the-birdie, smile-please sort of photographer. He advertised "Ambrotypes, Porcelains, Double Position (superior)," but his manner and methods weren't always guaranteed to flatter the subject. When an early customer brought in her small son with a bow tie stretched from ear to ear, she complained, after seeing the photographs Mather took of the boy, "They're homely."

"Well, dammit, ma'am," Mather said. "Look at yourself and your husband. What can you expect of that union?"

--from The Great Olidorado (1959)

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was no help-- 4:13-- having stopped at that hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she had wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

-- from Open the Door (1966)

Another hazard of our mountainside croquet was the two goats. Mother had acquired them soon after we moved in, and had tied them casually to a post in the backyard. Give them enough rope and they'd clear quite a good piece of property, she figured.It's true that by dint of inexhaustible appetites they eliminated the worst grass clumps, which is more than my brother and I did. On the other hand, none of us children ate the clothesline and three suits of my father's underwear, so this makes us all about even. The goats were named Belle and Beauty, perhaps to delude the neighbors about the way they smelled. They had been given to us, along with a little red goat cart, by a family leaving Franklin who had managed to contain their joy as they bid the goats good riddance.

Theoretically, one of the goats' chief duties, besides mowing the grass, was to pull Bobby, Sally and me, one at a time, in the goat cart. However, for some curious reason, Belle and Beauty were always confused and thought it was we children who were supposed to pull them. After we'd ridden a few hundred feet, both goats would sit down and wait to be hauled home. It was an awful unsatisfactory arrangement, and nobody cried when Belle and Beauty were given to a farmer who came to sell us eggs each week and admired the red goat cart. After he'd had the goats a week, he stopped bringing us eggs, probably to get even.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)

The chairman waved away these loose ends. He wore a red-jeweled ring on his little finger, and his sport jacket was so tight he looked rather like a sausage encased in madras plaid. "Fellow citizens, the PTA has asked me to make a top-priority announcement. Due to the sudden increase of child molesters, mothers are organizing volunteer watches at all school bus stops. This will continue till summer vacation, June twentieth. Volunteers may call Mrs. Hinck."

"What if the mothers are molested too?" somebody asked.

Mrs. Hinck stood up, or popped up. She looked very flushed and determined. "The mothers will go in pairs and they will be armed-- with paralyzing nerve gas."

"But that stuff is illegal."

"Not this brand," a man said. "It's on sale in the hardware store-- doesn't have much effect anyway except maybe make you sneeze." Somebody sneezed but changed it hurriedly to a nose-blow.

"Thank you, Mrs. Hinck," the chairman said. "I'm sure you'll get more volunteers than you can handle."

-from Heat Lightning (1969)

Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, a small, lively man with stick-out ears, cowlicked brown hair, and a shy, enchantingly sweet smile, sat having supper in the shanty-like hotel of a new oil settlement that would one day be named after him. Henry Rouse was thirty-seven years old, a bachelor, with the biggest following of children of any man around. The pockets of his rumpled suit bulged stickily with licorice and peppermints, and small friends surrounded him like the Good Humor Man. They scrambled up for rides on his big black mare, tagged him on foot, and listened saucer-eyed to his stories. With grownups, he was still bothered sometimes that had made him give up a law career, but with children it vanished magically.

-from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Owing to one of those mysterious social changes that come on as suddenly as elm blight, almost every hostess in Wingate was serving sandwiches for cocktail hors d'oeuvres that summer. No cheese. No nuts. No crunchies. Just dainty little sandwiches, very thin, water cress or cucumber or ham or some such. And that's how the vounteers at the local charity thrift shop, the Second Run, happened to inherit sandwiches for their tea that Friday afternoon. (Usually they had cookies from the supermarket.) Barbara Finney, the yongest volunteer, had brought sandwiches left over from the night before when she'd entertained her husband's boss.

As soon as Lucy Ramsdale bit into one, she knew why they'd been left over. "My God, what's in this?" As the oldest volunteer there, she was freer to say what she felt.

-from To Spite Her Face (1971)