Quotes from Donald Harington

There is only one way to come into this world there are too many ways to leave it.

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

This here will be the future tense and you will be able to do anything you will like in it.

Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.

Major: you have the honor to report that the numbers of men now under your command qualifies you for promotion to colonel. But you ask me to believe that your regiments assaulted Rebel forces in a pitched battle of over two hours duration, all the while steadily employing the heavy field pieces recently shipped to you, without one single battle death on either side . Sir, that is not warfare. That is fraternization with the enemy !

There is a popular saying, "More rare than pine is the smell of pining"—which is rare indeed, for there are few pine trees in this part of the Ozarks.

Man had a habit of routinely taking up and firing a revolver at the roosterroaches who dwelt in His house, with westerly accuracy depending on how much He had had to drink. Other ministers before Brother Tichborne had determined that this shooting and westering of chosen roosterroaches was both a form of punishment and an expression of Man's love, and therefore the shooting, or the act of being shot, was called not a westering but a Rapture.

The ways of Man are inscrutable. Man giveth, and Man taketh away. Blessed be the Name of Man (though Brother Chidiock Tichborne, who had a fine old name himself, had to admit that he did not know the name of his Man, nor of the Woman either).

Doc Colvin Swain was the seventh son of a seventh son, which Ozark tradition indicates as infallibly as the daily setting of the sun that he was destined to become a physician, even in spite of himself.

So in his maturity—he was no longer young, but had lived a full circuit of the earth around the sun—he had dropped his Crustian name and chosen to call himself Gregor Samsa Ingledew, the full meaning of which was known, or appreciated, only by himself.

The Golden Age of Stay More would remain only the subject of endless legends and embellished conjectures among the tale-telling roosterroaches until after The Bomb, when according to Crustian belief, Joshua Crust Himself would be resurrected from the west and take everyone in a Rapture to live on the right hand of Man in the perfect Ozark Golden Age of yore.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.