What kind of trees are those? I asked.Heartwood, my father said. They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear strea...
What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important.
We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.
Two kinds of cops eat their gun: the corrupt ones and the ones who let the dead lay claim upon the quick.
The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was los...
The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.
THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.
She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris...
People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.
Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next.
I’m tired of sackcloth and
I’m so strong I got muscles in my shit,
If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of...
I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth...
I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going...
Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past o...
Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over o...
But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either. How do you know that? They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.
But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to ha...