70 quotes found
“His spells portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, contstantly under attack and in need of stength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been tau...”
“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smot...”
“She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitc...”
“And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after anothe...”
“How would you ever come to know Gods name for that star? You wouldnt, He holds it close, the boy said. Its a thing youll never know. Its a lesson that sometimes were meant to settle for ignorance....”
“In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was s...”
“...I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.”
“So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke ...”
“Back then, he'd have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became it's own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.”
“He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.”
“Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.”
“The flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect.”
“Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.”
“And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the l...”
“It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.”
“His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.”
“You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you'...”
“Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?”
“How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we're mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And...”
“They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time ano...”
