Quotes from Larry Watson

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one's breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won't warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what's no longer there.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.

With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.

Out of town I could simply be , I could feel my self , firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water's monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn't feel within it.

From the bluffs east of the city, Gladstone, Montana looks as though it could have been laid out by a shotgun blast, the commercial and residential districts a tight cluster in the center and then the buckshot dispersing in the looser pattern of outlying houses and businesses owned by those Montanans for whom space is a stronger article of faith than neighborliness.

My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.

Now no sign, no scorch or char, marks the place where George built the fire. Remarkable, earth's strength to restore itself and erase human effort. But memory, stronger still, can send flames as high as the roof, and shift the wind and choke George and sting his eyes with smoke...

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

The odd thing about understanding was how often time alone seemed seemed to bring it about.

It's not so much

was a phrase my mother inherited from her mother. I had heard Grandma Anglund use it for occasions ranging from a scraped knee (mine) to a family burned out of its farm.

Norwegian way of keeping all our earthly affairs from achieving too much importance.

Mercer County, Montana.

How long can a household's slumber be expected to hold with a stranger in its midst? Won't someone soon sense a breath that does not belong? The tread of a foot too heavy, too light, on a creaking board? Won't a dream veer off its course and into danger?

Looking in the dead bird's eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections—sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation

Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana

On the western edge of the county and extending into two other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948

If you don't like wind," Grandfather replied, "you don't like Montana. Because it blows here 360 days a year. Better get used to it.

Out in Montana you wouldn't be worth dirtying a man's hands on. Or his boots. So we'd handle him this way. Nice and clean.

Pop says, 'Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I'm going to finish this whiskey and then I'm coming

People are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana

Deputy sheriff." He looked down at his shirt as though he expected to see his badge there. "Which I owe to your granddad and your dad. You know what your granddad said it means to be a peace officer in Montana? He said it means knowing when to look and when to look away. Took me a while to learn that.