Quotes from Ron Rash

The Release In those last moments before the platter of salt and dirt lay on his stomach, wax-light had waved across a mute heart, his son waited by the bed. Raised to believe the soul left the body with its last breath, he listened for death's rattle, then pressed his lips like a kiss to his father's lips, and took into his mouth the breath that had given him breath, a life distilled to one stir of air soft as moth wings against palms, held a moment, then let go.

Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child.

Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they'd died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.

This is what we want," she said, her voice deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully unbridled now. "To be like this always. No past or future, pure enough to live totally in the present.

disse Serena.

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.

I'd see that look again when I taught at the community college, always in the eyes of women who'd grown up hard, a distrust of anything spoken softly.

He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges, Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of Look Homeward, Angel, and those words I spoke aloud to the bathroom mirror that summer, and thought of Wolfe in New York, writing between journeys to the West, and of Hemingway traveling from Paris cafés to African veldts. "YOU'RE

can't watch her die," he told her. "I just can't." He waited on the porch till it was over.

Having shot down a number, some of which were anly wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me.

In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.

Something would happen or it wouldn't happen, and that was the way of it.

All we'll ever need is within each other, Serena said, her voice barely more than a whisper. Even when we have our child, it will only be an image of what we already are.

It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

He wanted to make the world better, but, according to Rodney, the world wasn't interested.

You are not quite ready yet, though. For the next six months, practice until your arms ache and your lips bleed. The suffering will be good for you. A slight smile crossed the conductor's face. If you haven't already found a woman who will break your heart, find one. What we played tonight, especially the Mozart, requires suffering.

you got one choice at the beginning, but if you didn't choose right..things got narrow real quick.

The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Exra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New.

Pemberton felt something shift inside him, something small but definite, the way a knob's slight twist allowed a door to swing wide open.

wisely reconsidered and let the hand

Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War. Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob, she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.

It was the kind of early-fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet fallen--a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger.

Libenter homines id quad volunt credunt." "Men are glad to believe that which they wish for?" Miss Calicut asked. Professor