A child can love a mother who has no capacity to love him in return, but in time, he realizes that he is pouring his affection not on fertile ground but on rock, where nothing can be grown. A child might then spend a life defined by settled anger or by self-pity. If the mother is not a monster, if she is instead emotionally disconnected and self-absorbed, and if she.
The day in Pico Mundo when I lost Stormy will forever be the worst day of my life, although since then each place I go seems in one way or another to be darker than the place before it.
Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.
Because Mitch would not have life without his mother and because her cluelessness did not encompass malice, she inspired a tenderness that was not love or even affection. It was instead a sad regard for her congenital incapacity for sentiment. This tenderness had nearly ripened into the pity that he withheld from his father.
He descended the ramp, stopped on the sidewalk, and turned to me. “Man, I’m glad you’re back.” “I’m not back yet,” I said, “but I will be.
Loneliness is the fate of he who dares to change the world.
You’re a scary woman, the way you know a man’s mind.
Parasitism,” Daniel said, “isn’t natural to Homo sapiens or to any species of mammal.” Beaver Cleaver would never have heard that line from his dad.
Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.
The government will decide that the public prefers to remain ignorant of such disturbing near disasters, and the political class prefers to keep them ignorant.
His base sins were envy – of beauty, of happiness – and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.
One man’s idea of perfect order is another man’s chaos. One man’s vision of perfect beauty is another man’s notion of deformity.
There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void.
Probably they prefer we don’t see them, but they want us to know what’s happening with the weather because fear debilitates. Maybe they want us frightened, cowering, and pliable.
In truth, there were no tracks of destiny through the chaos of life, only paths forged by decisions.
What I do not know is the only thing I know, and in that paradox sits Trixie. I do not know what she was in the fullness of her being, other than a dog, but I know the effect she had on us, and I know that she was both flesh and mystery, and therefore I know that she was something more than I can know.
Life is full of mysteries, isn’t it? And maybe we don’t always need to know the answers to them. Each thing we don’t understand is a wall, and we spend our lives throwing ourselves against those walls, with little to show for it in the end. Maybe sometimes it’s just best to accept the limitations of our understanding, accept that some things will be forever beyond our knowledge.
Of all wildlife, mule deer fawns are the safest newborns, ’cause during their entire first year, they don’t produce a scent by which a predator might find them.
She lived to love and to receive love, which is the condition of angels.
With their sinewy legs, lean flanks, and narrow muzzles, coyotes appear to be designed for speed and savage assault, and yet even as they face you down with a predatory gleam in their eyes, they have some of the appeal of dogs. Prairie wolves, some people call them, and although they lack most of the charm of wolves, they do have a puppylike quality because their feet are too big for their bodies and their ears are too big for their heads.