Quotes from Ron Rash

Ma niente è solido e duraturo. Le nostre vite si reggono su fondamenta instabili. Non è necessario leggere i libri di storia per scoprirlo. Ti basta conoscere la storia della tua vita.

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.

Pemberton felt again what he'd never known with another woman— a sense of being unshackled into some limitless possibility, limitless though at the same time somehow contained within the two of them.

It's ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing.

You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don't know how you did it. You must love that child dear as life." "I tried not to," Rachel said. "I just couldn't find a way to stop myself.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start

Don't love anything that can be taken away.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing 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 was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you'd eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)

It's ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing." – Snipes (185)

Nothing is but what is now

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children

And darkness. You can't see it no more than you can see air, but when it's all around you sure enough know it.

She walks in beauty.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

We want what's in this world but we also want what ain't.

The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope.

Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better

Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we're there, we'll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven's glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They'll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?