Quotes from Laird Hunt

El Señor nos había dado ojos para ver y pies para llevarnos a sitios donde pudiera verse todo, dijo. Era cosa nuestra salir y ver, salir y contemplar. Ese era nuestro trabajo. Debíamos atarnos bien los cordones de los zapatos y ponernos a ello. Lo peor que podía pasarnos era que fracasáramos. Y el fracaso solo significaba que habíamos tenido agallas suficientes para intentarlo.

Don't be weak, my boy', I whispered. I know he heard me. It was something I had told him many times. But what did I mean? For I did not want him to be strong either. Not like his father, who could fling his cousin through the air. Not like my mother, who could chase the husband, who so loved her, with a switch. I meant some other thing. Something like Captain Jane in her wolf cloak. Something like Eliza when the metal was in her voice and she had set her jaw.

He would gather up the ages and plant and reap what he and his father had sown. All the while I would watch. From my chair. From my window. From my garden. Watch until my eyes died at their roots and I fell cold silent in my skirts and could watch no more.

like quills, dreams can mark you, dreams can stripe your back.

For a moment, as if the years had been set aside and they were back in his classroom, she had an urge to raise her hand and ask Mr. Thomas if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised, but instead she reached for the sewing kit and let the small smile that formed on her lips and the thought of raising her hand after all this time serve in place of what might have been an interesting answer.

she said she heard nothing, that our friend might well be screaming, but what I heard was only the memory of my own scream trapped like a wasp inside my head.

Life, Virgil had said, was a good deal about discouragement and fear, and the soul, which was the true heart of humankind whether you looked at it Christian or otherwise, needed a good deal of comforting some way or other if it was expected to soldier on.

Each scream is as different as each Red Boy. Different and the same.

Grief seemed to constitute a kind of connective membrane, not a divide, and the 'fragile film of the present' felt strengthened, not threatened, by the past. Tears, it struck her—even ones that spilled out of your mouth or off a table—formed a fretwork the wingless could learn to walk over, if there had been enough of them and you tried.

One is you, two is me, three is her, four is she!

There is always part of us admits we are done when the rest of us is not yet ready.

Rules are the way of the world! Did you never dance? Did you never stomp your foot around a ring of fire? Which way do you step? Which way do you stomp? How do you decide?

Ve. Ve, y a ver qué hay en ti.