Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.
But Luce takes the attitude, when you start fretting the day-by- day you lose track of the long view. And the long view is, they need to learn to speak for themselves and do the best they can. For now, if they bag their own lunch and it’s pickles and prunes and they say the words, all you do is put both thumbs up and say, Good job.
I’ve had relatives so crooked they nearly went to prison, but if you have money you never actually go. They make you think it for a while, and that’s your punishment.
Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.
Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.
Blood covered his face and dirt had gummed to it, so that his visage was ocher in color and appeared like a clay sculpture illustrating some earlier phase of mankind when facial features were yet provisional.
Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.
He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind.
Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would be the soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.
Inman felt like God’s most marauded bantling.
To Ada, though, it seemed akin to miracle that Stobrod, of all people, should offer himself up as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one’s life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.
Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?
He picked out a little twenty-dollar gold piece.
We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.
He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren’t possible anymore – explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped.
The children quivered and drew the quilt up to their noses, and Luce could feel them squirming towards her, their feet reaching under the covers to touch her hip where she sat on the edge of the bed. When the big goat laid the troll low, they drew a deep breath and let it out slow. By the third night, she had them joining her to shout the final lines. Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.
She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.
History reveals a person’s deeds – their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream – unpenetrated, unguessed.
She draws a long deep breath and hums a bit of “Sunflower Slow Drag,” her fingers twitching to press imaginary keys. Soon she falls asleep.
The mood I was in, I saw the large sweep of America’s history as Florida’s assault on civilization.
She’d said one night, I don’t think about the past much. I try to take each day as it presents itself and let sleep put it away before the next sunrise.