She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them o...
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.
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 taught...
His best talent had yet to be determined, unless you counted unrealized potential.
If you are in the mountains alone for some time, many days at minimum, & it helps if you are fasting. The forest grows tired of its weariness towards you; it resumes its inner life and allows you to s...
[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.
They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!
She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.
Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.
I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope....
That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way...
A man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living...His spirit blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him...It seemed a poor swap to find...
Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.
He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years bet...
Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said.Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told on...
We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.
And all the ministers of the various types of local Baptists had declined to participate in retribution for Monroe’s failure to believe in a God with severe limitations on His patience and mercy.
Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.
History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.
Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.