Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.
No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.
But the only rhyme he could summon for ‘out’ was ‘sauerkraut,’ which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.
If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.
Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...
The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow.
What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know.’ It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don’t develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.
All must pay the debt of nature.
And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
In every life there are events that reshape one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
You’ve got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start.
The forest had many edges, like a lace altarpiece.
Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.
Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by a sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.
The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her.
The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.
That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it.
Right,” said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.
Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. “I can feel the season changing,” he said. “Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father’s grave. Put it off last year and the year before.” Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.
Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it – even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.