Quotes from Brian Francis Slattery

They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now.

There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.

There must be something better than this world, and the world must be better than this.

We do not know what is on the other side of the storm.

These cords that God makes, Reverend Bauxite thought, we stand holding one end while they run taut into the darkness.

Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.

Transcendence and dissolution, always the same thing.

The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

The war keeps taking pieces of me anyway. Makes the rest of me harder to hit.

You know," she had said, "I believe we are all given at least one moment in our lives when the world reveals itself to us, in all its workings. We comprehend everything at once, and then forget almost all of it a second later, because none of us could hold it all in our heads. But we are changed afterward," shaking her head, "in a most profound way.

The war could kill the faith in him, too, if he was not strong or careful enough. He could feel it fluttering within him sometimes, a bird in a cage of knives. Its own blood on its face and wings.

His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.

Marco smiles, they shake hands, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman sees it again, as he did when Marco knelt before him just a few minutes ago: The light warps around Marco Angelo Oliveira; the colors of the trees and sky stretch and smear, as if Marco is an empty place in the shape of a man and the earth and air around him are screaming to fill it.

Nothing of it spoken between them. They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now. Here, in these words. Us and the city and the towns and river, and everything else, too. All that we know, and everything—everyone—we wish we knew.

They tried to tell us that what happened to them would happen to us, too, but we could not hear the message. Mistook it for nostalgia, when they were speaking prophecy.