Quotes:
Three or four times in my life it has been given to me, as Brownie might have put it, to say the right thing, and this was one of them. I take no credit for it anyway.
will call upon the Almighty to send down upon him the gift of charity—charity is the most important gift of them all, Antonio—and the gift of faith, and the gift of the word of wisdom. Those three are absolute musts. Without them you’re licked before you start.
I have always suspected prayer is more for man’s sake than for God’s—it is not God who needs to be praised but we who need to praise him, whether we believe in him or not.
I’ll tell you one thing about what it’s all about, and that is that it’s hard, Antonio. It’s all of it hard. Right down to the end. Even the things are supposed to be easy, they’re hard too.
I have a feeling it’s the in-between times, the times that narratives like this leave out and that the memory in general loses track of, which are the times when souls are saved or lost.
Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then. Her long hair dividing over her bare shoulders, her lashes dark against her cheeks as she looked down at the page, she could go nowhere from this moment except away from it. She still had a long way to go before she left it behind for good, but I felt like Father Hopkins anyway as I watched her—How to keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, from vanishing away…
When you think you’ve reached a turning point, the chances are you’ve already passed it.
I was like the man who happens to scratch his ear at an auction. God only knew what I might end up paying.
Gertrude Conover said, “Everything, that’s all. Everything’s got to do with everything else. Everything fits in somewhere, and there’s no power in heaven or earth that can upset the balance.”
“Forget not the congregation of the poor forever, for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty,”
As she ducked down under the table to pick them up, the eyes of Anita Steen and my eyes met roughly at the place where Sharon’s face had been, and instead of meeting there as enemies, we met for the first and only time in our lives as old war comrades coming together in an empty place where some crucial battle had taken place while both of us were looking the other way. Anita Steen tried flashing her brigadier wrinkles at me, but for once they failed her, just rocketed like tears from the outer corners of her eyes and fizzled out in the shadowy no man’s land where her smile should have been. Sharon was the prize we both were battling for, and with our eyes we told each other we both had lost.
‘Gertrude Conover, I don’t know. I’m homesick, but I don’t know what I’m homesick for any more than you do.’
Young and old, black and white, town and gown—“Antonio, it’s Noah’s ark,” Bebb said to me at some point. “We got two of everything, only here it’s the clean and the unclean both.”
Friends, while we’re still sitting here feeling good let us promise to remember how for a little bit of time we loved each other in this place.
Irony is a game primarily for grownups. A form of solitaire.
In distant cities mothers unaccountably gathered their children to their skirts and stray dogs showed their teeth as I reached out and took her hand in mine.
You can’t be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he’ll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
You take anything people have ever done in this world, and the best you can say about any of it is that it’s maybe one part honest and well-meant and the other nine parts shit.
“I said, ‘Virgil, the night is dark, and we are far from home.’ How come it was the words of that old hymn popped into my mind just then to say? I don’t know, but it did. I said, ‘The night is dark, Virgil Roebuck, and home’s a long ways off for both of us.’
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die.
When asked his estimation of Bebb, High School English prof Parr quotes Browning: We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die.
“Why not just get the hell out, Bip?” I said. He said, “Because getting the hell out, that’s what hell is, Antonio. I’ve got to gird up my loins for the next round. I’ve got to move on.”
Bebb said, “Sharon, nobody that doesn’t have faith ought to feel too bad about it. Even the ones that have it, it’s not like they have it permanent, like a face-lift.”
a capacity if not for rising above irony like the saints, at least for living it out with something like grace, with the suspicion if not the certainty that maybe the dark and hurtful shadows all things cast are only shadows.
“The trouble with folks like Brownie is they hold their life in like a bakebean fart at a Baptist cookout and only let it slip out sideways a little at a time when they think there’s nobody noticing. Now that’s the last thing on earth the Almighty intended. He intended all the life a man’s got inside him, he should live it out just as free and strong and natural as a bird.
“Sometimes just heartbreak is enough to make us puke, dear.
“I never had a child of my own, but it always seemed as though maybe having faith wasn’t all that different a thing. It seemed as though faith was like somebody to take care of you when you got old. A shoulder to lean on when the shadows lengthened and your work was done. A hand to hold. Now it’s like I had a child once but it’s died. There are times I don’t know as how I can keep on going.”
When a marriage cracks like a plate and is glued together again, of all the things you’ve got to be careful about, the first is to look as if you aren’t being careful about any of them.
“I’d rather be wrong about all those things I believe in and more or less alive and interested than right as rain and bored half to death.”
“Dear Bip, Even if you never worked a miracle, you were a miracle, and that’s what counts.
and I said, “Oh shit, Bip”—shit not as an expletive but as a cry of longing and despair that welled up not just out of Callaway’s getting screwed but out of the whole world’s getting screwed, out of all sadness, failure, loss. “Poor everybody” Sharon had said among the brown roses, and Brownie, Jimmy Bob, my nephew Tony with the baby in his arms, everybody was included in my excremental lament. I said, “He’s been coming two thousand years, Bip, and he hasn’t made it yet.” “He’ll make it,” Bebb said. Then Babe said, “Hi-yo Silver,” and then “Brrrrum brrrrum brrrrum bum bum” in strenuous imitation of the overture to William Tell by Gioachino Rossini.
In a world where we are often closer to the truth in dreams than anywhere else, who is to say what is possible and not possible, true and not true, any more than in dreams you can say it?
I thought of Gideon and Barak and Samson and all those others who are said to have spent their lives dreaming of a homeland which they had had only a glimpse of from afar and not all that clear a glimpse either. I mentioned them to Brownie as we set off just to see what he would say, and I remember him still as he turned to look at me over the back of his seat through his cracked lenses and said, “They were the great heroes of the faith, dear, but they died still guessing just like the rest of us.”
“And yet,” she said, her hand on the varnished bannister, “Thank your stars there is always and yet. This side of Paradise, perhaps it is the best you can hope for.
My dear, everything that happens is absolutely seething with miracle, and who sees it? Who even wants to see it most of the time? Life is confusing enough as it is.”
It’s not the way we either one of us would have ever picked, but there’s not any way on this earth doesn’t lead to the throne of grace in the end if that’s where you’ve got your heart set on going.
As Stephen Kulak is bound to discover someday, the effect of death on a household is not unlike the effect of a wedding—the same comings and goings, the same suspension of routine, the sense of holiday almost and of history, the gathering of the clan.
Treasure Hunt
But to be honest I must say that on occasion I can also hear something else too—not the thundering of distant hoofs, maybe, or Hi-yo, Silver. Away! echoing across the lonely sage, but the faint chunk-chunk of my own moccasin heart, of the Tonto afoot in the dusk of me somewhere who, not because he ought to but because he can’t help himself, whispers Kemo Sabe every once in a while to what may or may not be only a silvery trick of the failing light.
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