Quotes from breece d'j pancake

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

Well, when everybody's going this way, it's time to turn around and go that way, you know? ... I don't care if they end up shitting gold nuggets, somebody's got to dig in the damn ground. Somebody's got to.

I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

But if life has any definition at all, it is the things that happen to us while we are making plans.

Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on. --from The Honored Dead

I stop in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it. It's always there, you just look at somebody and they give you a look like the Wrath of God.

He hears false power in the preacher's voice, sees outsiders pretending. Old fool, he thinks, new fools are here to take your place.

We will live on mangoes and love.

A writer, no matter what the context, is made an outsider by the demands of his vocation

In the window I see our ghosts against the black gloss of glass. She put her arm around me, and I think how we maybe never left the business end.

I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. From Trilobites