Quotes from Gary A. Braunbeck

Love isn't a smiling bride who holds a colorful bouquet and gazes lovingly at her husband; it's a corpse-littered battlefield where the walking wounded have to keep searching for survivors or die themselves.

Can you understand what it's like to miss something so terribly that you'll accept even the shadow of its memory to keep your heart from withering away?" -From "Danaïd Night

Take my advice - if you expect no kindness, then you won't be disappointed when none is given; but, Lord, are you all the more grateful for it when it is!" -From "In the Lowlands

You love them all the more for their concern, but wish they'd get it through their heads that there are some people who don't need the constant companionship of other human beings in order to feel that their life has meaning." From "...He Didn't Even Leave a Note...

A life lived in loneliness is no life at all." -"Mail-Order Annie

I am not one who believes that killing yourself is necessarily a coward's way out. It is my belief that a body'd have to be in a lot of pain in order to think a death the likes of this was preferable to breathing in the air of one more morning." -From "Matthew in the Morning

Why is it that people are precious to you only after they're a memory?

The funny thing is," she said, "that I still love him. I don't want to—he butchered my mother and my little brother, then blew his own head off—but I still find that, when I think about him, I still feel some love. Pathetic, isn't it?

As a neutrino has no mass or electrical charge and can pass through the planet in a blink, so this bag lady's existence can pass through this world; she, like the neutrino, is a ghost, yet both are real, both exist and have presence, even if that presence is unseen or ignored.