Quotes from Erin Hart

Making yourself an outcast was one way to avoid the pain of having it done to you.

We're made out of the water, the earth, the air of the places that fed our ancestors, quenched their thirst, the basic elements of the places that gave them life. Is it really so strange if we feel the heave and pitch of those places, even centuries later, in the vibrations of our atoms?

All of us insist upon our illusions, upon substituting dreams and distorted memories for the real thing.

believe that what happens in the world never really goes away. Everything that has been remains somehow, makes an impression. Some things make stronger impressions than others, but it all leaves something behind, some change, some ripple in time, don't you think? It's probably the best we can hope for.

From the poorest places came the richest music—it had always been that way.

Was it possible for the living to haunt their fellow creatures? For something as intangible as the mere memory of a gesture to slip into the subconscious unbidden and remain there until some firing synapse, some chemical key set it free?

It seemed to him that delusion was the most natural of human states; it was honesty that was the aberration.

Of course, all forms of creativity are a way of dipping one's toes in the essence of the divine.

The grass did not live in order to be cut down, but in spite of cutting. Its nature was to grow and go to seed and grow again. He felt the rebellion in his own soul swell sympathetically whenever he stood on this small patch of earth. The world was meant to be wild, unbridled.

When did a person begin to emerge from that fantastical sea of childhood onto the dry land of adult existence?

And what was sport, underneath, but a kind of sanitized, ritualized violence?

What was sport but a thin veneer over the factional fighting it had replaced—ritualized violence, bloody entertainment?

All of us insist on our illusions, upon substituting dreams and distorted memories for the real thing...It seemed to him that delusion was the most natural of human states; it was honesty that was the aberration.

Their union had always seemed a near-perfect balance: strong individuals married together to make a separate entity greater than either of them alone, a mystery unfathomable even to themselves.

A group of people was something like a primitive organism, affected by mood and atmosphere and even weather, resistant to change, with each member playing a specific role. Leaders, followers, scourges, clowns—every group had them, and people slipped into their parts as easily as actors taking on familiar stock roles.