Quotes from Robert Goolrick

Then there was survival. There was going on, as she had always gone on, without much joy, against her will, against her instincts, without the stomach for it, but on and on and on, without relief, without release, without a hand to reach out and touch her heart. Without kindness or comfort. But on. Forced into such poverty, imprisoned in such despair, there was only one thing she was sure she could do. She could survive.

she had brought harm to him, in the believe that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die".

How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep.

It's a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don't know anymore. Or even want to know.

Men only give you what they give you...when they know they can't give you what you want.

In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.

She had been adept at the beginning and the end of things, and now she saw that whatever pleasures life had to offer lay in the middle. She could find some peace there.

I heard this old country guy say once, "I think you decide pretty early on how happy you're going to be, and then you just go on and be it." But I don't think that's the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

Yes. Childhood is the most dangerous place of all. If we had to live there forever, we wouldn't last very long.

She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.

Children remember staying up late. Grownups think about getting up early

Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.

Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go.

Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it's my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o'clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.

If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.

Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children. Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever. (208)

desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event.

She was the beautiful, lethal,insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his heart with gladness.

He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.

He loved her so much he felt his bones would break. Loving her was like lying in a bed of nettles, and the feel of her skin against his was the only balm, the only time the stinging stopped, while, for her, he was the warm bath she took to stave off the cold waterfall of Boaty's indifference.

But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, "Don't ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family." And then she had a lot to do. (174)

Here's another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it's about to rain.

You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.

When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand- new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.