Quotes from Ron Rash

A Servant of History Her eyes were of the lightest blue as if time had rinsed away most of the colour, but there was a liveliness inside them.

petrichord: the sound of water sliding over smooth stone.

The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree.

Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing.

What does eminent domain mean?" Stewart asked. "It means you're shit out of luck," Ross said.

all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could.

I missed that one,' Henryson said. 'The war, I mean.' 'Don't worry,' Snipes said. 'Another one's always coming down the pike. That's something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller over in Germany looks to be ready to set a match to Europe soon enough, and quick as they snuff him out there'll be another to take his place.

a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one's personal failures.

He'd felt incredibly lucky they'd found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn't mere good fortune but inevitability.

Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she might reappear and tell Bill what I'd never confessed to him. But after a while nostalgia supplanted guilt and our summer at Panther Creek became more a tender coming-of-age story, a summer of love complete with bucolic setting.

So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth.

But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it.

Nietzsche once said "that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." I didn't believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate—and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness.

He couldn't imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena's beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable

Do this one thing.

A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.

An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass

I guess sometimes you've got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.

You Men notice so little Pemberton, Physical strength is your genders sole advantage - Serena

I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe's house. I'd planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.

Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?