Quotes from Brady Udall

If I could tell you only one thing about my life, it would be this: When I was 7 years old, the mailman ran over my head.

When it comes to love, everyone is a liar.

Families are Forever, and wondered if the slogan was meant as a promise or a threat.

For most affairs, this eventually becomes the most fundamental of questions, the only one that matters: Do we love each other more than the lives we already have? It is the question that hovers in the background of every secret phone call, flavors every tryst with the head of possibilities of apocalypse and renewal; and it is the answer to that question, or the lack thereof, that so often dooms an affair to failure.

When it comes to love, everyone is a liar.

She considered, maybe for the first time, how lucky she was to be able to pick up the phone and call her mother whenever she needed bad advice.

Unlike Rosa, I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand. It is all a mystery, or more accurately, a mess. There are no heroes or villains, no saviors or demons or angels. Only those who have died and those of us who, for whatever reason, have survived. None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don't know that I will ever have faith in Him.

The life of a plural wife, she'd found, was a life lived under constant comparison, a life spent wondering. Sitting across from her sister-wives at Sunday dinner, the platters and serving dishes floating past like hovercraft, the questions were almost inescapable; Who of us is the most happy? Which of us is his one true love? Who does he desire the most?

There was one difference I would come to realize, between white kids and Indians. Among white kids there are tattletales everywhere. Indians? An Indian wouldn't tattle to save his own mother. Indians, over the years, have learned the value of keeping their mouths shut.

For Golden it was hard not to think that there might be something wrong about a household in which the dog was wearing underwear and the children weren't.

Golden would find himself thinking that if he ever became delusional or foolhardy enough to outfit one of his houses with a complaint box, it would need to be about the size of a refrigerator.

It's a wonderful epiphany: with a lie I can change reality; with a lie I can change the world.

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.

I typed becasue I had to. I typed because I was afraid I might disappear. --Edgar Mint

He knows that for all the undeserved bounty of his life, she will always be there, at the edge of his vision, to remind him of all the things he can never have.

Even in the midst of all this commotion she knows none of it really belongs to her, and marvels at the strange fact of her dearest wish: to be part of it, to give in to it's distractions, to find herself the owner of a life lived rather than a life endured. And then she looks into the face of Mother #3, worn smooth and almost featureless, with moist eyes that can't seem to settle on anything for more than a heartbeat at a time, and she knows this is a very dangerous wish.

When she's next to him, when she rests her hand on his, his whole body aches with something like knowledge for all he has lost, the chances he will never have, to return such a touch, to fall of a horse or eat chinese food or shoot a crossbow (which has always been one of his most dear wishes), to receive a letter in the mail, to be kissed with longing or punched in the jaw.

Is this what it all comes to? I wondered. Is this how it is supposed to turn out? You have your accidents, your broken bones and diseases, and then there is a strange hairiness that overtakes you and pretty soon you're dead, put in a wooden box and buried under a pile of dirt?