In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest – littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills – has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.
Those people would take you in and put you up and feed you and feed your horse and cry when you left.
These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them.
He found Reese asleep in a wrecked car behind the cabins. Suttree shook him gently awake into a world he wanted no part of. The old man fought it.
The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams.
It’s easier to remember two things than one. It’s why it’s easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.
The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert.
Die Geschichte ist eine Sammlung von Papier. Ein paar verblassende Erinnerungen. Nach einer Weile ist das, was nicht geschrieben steht, nie geschehen.
He saw a tourist drunk laboring up the sidewalk carrying a full suit of armor. He saw a beautiful young woman vomit in the street. Dogs turned at the sound and ran toward her.
The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes.
Suttree stalked off to find the boy. I just come from there, the boy said. Well get your ass up cause you’re going again. They aint no need to cuss about it, the boy said. It Sunday and all.
Save for their guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals there was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel.
The example he gave was of a tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz. No matter through whatever turnings nor how many of them. Till our turn comes at last and our turn passes.
But salvation like many another prize may be simply a matter of daring.
If the world has a mind then it’s all worse than we thought.
On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allotted them by the chance drop of a seed.
It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain. He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?
There’s always somebody that doesn’t get the word.
She said one time that just because the world was spinning didnt mean that you couldnt get off. There’s.
When I come back there is no laughing. No one is laughing. You see. That has always been my way in this world. I am the one when I go someplace then there is no laughing. When I go there then they stop laughing.