Quotes from Jonis Agee

There's a lot of true things that happen in our life. I think we see them at the very moment they happen too, then we try to forget about them.

She stooped to pick a wild pink rose, avoiding the tiny spines that slivered like unseen glass hairs onto one's fingers. There was little scent, but the creamy softness of the petals like the insides of a dog's ear more than made up for it. She placed one on her tongue, and imagined she could taste the hills, the bittersweet tang of life.

They were teaching the horse to work cattle, and Graver showed her son how to ride in concert with the animal, not against it. She saw that was the way a person must move through the world, while across the hills, the evening fog drifted like an exhaled breath and the peepers began their rhythmic chirring music as the night horses pulled the dark curtain across the sky until they slept and awakened once more, rising like dreamers out of the mist to claim the world again.

She blew in like a hard west wind, the kind that dropped a man's bones to zero, froze his hair to his skull, and clogged his eyes with ice.

But when you make love, the dead stay close, fill the bed, lie along the bodies in tiers, sandwiching all their lives with yours.

You can't push on a person so hard that they have to give up every single secret, she was discovering. Some things were better locked away in the heart where they could remain a hard, bitter kernel that they had become in such darkness.