Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the...
Sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice.
When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.
To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.
The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we...
That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.
Taking the life of a nation is a serious task, V says. Few succeed, even if the cause is just. We didn't, and ours wasn't. But sometimes I can't help missing those days when we all just took care of e...
She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerful...
Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so tha...
Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and...
Most of the travel was purposeless, carried out in exactly the desperate spirit of fleeing from pursuers. It was romantic, in a certain sense. Especially if you’re not the one doing it.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever.
Life can get fucked up fast when you try to be a pleaser. Because people won't ever be pleased, not even if you drop them ass-first into paradise. They like bitching too much.
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.
It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.
In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce's mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her...
I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter. I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't se...