Quotes from Kent Haruf

Not like I was. I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.

You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.

I don't imagine I'll ever get over missing him, Raymond said. Some things you don't get over. I believe this'll be one of them.

You don't deserve it, he said aloud. Don't ever begin to think that you do.

You can't fix things, can you, Louis said. We always want to. But we can't.

And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.

That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her. And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards.

It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.