Quotes from Brad Watson

Life is not fair in that way or any other way. We are who and what we are.

She loved most being in the woods with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.

Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned.

She looked at him. She thought that indeed he might love her, in some way. The love of one human being for another, which does not demand classification or mode.

You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries. Early on she acquired ways of dealing with her life, with life in general. And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing — perhaps only horses and something she couldn't quite name, a strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world.

She understood somehow that she was lucky in her special way to love these events without the complicated, pressing question of physical love, to absorb life from the center and its periphery at once, so she could for a while take it all in with the sweet fullness of the entirely human and the utterly strange, without apprehension or fear.

from miserable, starving children' to 'picking winners',

Well she never thought life would be so full of meanness and disappointment. She hadn't been prepared for it.

It'll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everyone becoming some kind of light shade if brown. That's what it'll be one day.

It's funny about hearing, the way it goes. She finally got her hearing aid to work right, got it to squeak, but that lady down at the nursing home said she just took hers out, said she'd heard enough already.

Papa?' she'd say. 'Yes.' And sometimes they would say no more than that, as if that were enough, or all there was, a generic reply to her all-but-unspoken query into his condition. She sat and looked at his lean, hard profile, now bearing the wire-rimmed spectacles, and wondered what he was seeing as he stared straight ahead into the yard beyond the porch, seeming deep in thought but saying nothing.

Whereas all her life her mother had more often than not been in conflict not only with others but with herself, her own circumstances, angry about one thing or another, mostly dissatisfied and even resentful of her lot in life, now she seemed to have let that go. But in its stead, there appeared to be nothing. As if she had finally fully burned her ability to care about anything in the long-stoked fire of her discontent. And now she was empty.

he was less fearful around the dead than the living...It was that he and the dead shared the same secret, which was that the fearful illusion of mortality - and immortality, as well - is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear. Only the dead see one another, and themselves, for what they truly were, or are. The terrifying idea of time did not apply at all.