Quotes from Robert Olmstead

Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?...He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage...

Our souls have been suffering in a kind of darkness

All that night he followed bends of the black road jeweled by starlight until the wan light of the dawn touched the east with red and the pastures turned green.

every night I fold myself into her, every night she comes into my life and I feel her hand on my heart and she is saying, I am here ... I am here.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning.

this cat-and-mouse could not last forever, and he also knew that when you are the mouse you don't have much to say about it to the cat.

Of late she'd become impatient with the inexplicit needs of boys and men and their acting so rashly on what they could not fathom and surely could not articulate. - Coal Black Horse Chapter 1

In her mind, men were no different than droughty weather or a sudden burst of rainless storm.

They came and they went; they ached and pained. They laughed privately and cried to themselves as if heeding a way- off silent call. They were forever childish, sweet and convulsive. They heard sound the way dog heard sound. They were like the moon- they changed every eight days.

Do you ever think about the rocks? he said. How does that go? Maybe they are alive and their hearts beat once every thousand years and they only need to take a breath every five hundred.

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ 'Coal Black Horse