Quotes from Peter Heller

twenty-eight miles to the next one, Godawful Falls. Then eighty-one miles of fast water after that, to the next huge drop and portage at Last Chance Falls, with a couple of bigger rapids between, dangerous but runnable. A large meander in this stretch, northwest to northeast,

All the choices we can't see. Every moment.

with a sense of having been spared and having been blessed.

Wynn's loss reverberated and was swept up into the more pervasive loss of his mother just as the sound of the stream rose up and was scattered by the wind in these pines.

Poor horse. It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.

They could hear again the gathering whispers, the swooshes and squeals, the cracks, almost as if the fire were questioning its own intentions and the woods were answering: 'We have been waiting for you our whole lives.

Wynn had seen it before: injured people who had barely enough energy to shift a little, to eat, but not enough to talk. Strange that words took so much life force.

Ich will zwei Menschen gleichzeitig sein. Der eine rennt weg.

It was an achievement-free zone, which Wynn was coming to realize is where most of his joy happened.

Sometimes I catch myself being a person I wouldn't tolerate for five minutes at my own kitchen table. Being a thoughtless, self-centered jerk.

It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.

They could barely feel the breeze on their left ears and cheeks and it moved the fog over the water with a timeless languor as if there never had been a time without fog and there would never be one again. It seemed to be lightening.

Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I'll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.

The tears that weren't there yesterday flood. Break the dam and flood.

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occurred to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. And life was inside death, virulent and insistent as a strain of flu. How it should be.

What he'd noticed in all true masters was that the focus turned soon, or immediately, into full absorption by the act itself. The actor surrendered, and it was as if, like a change in tide, the energy was now flowing in the opposite direction-from the river, or the basketball court, or the painting. Flowing into the one who was doing. It swept her up and carried her. It fueled her, and in the most intense moments allowed her to relax

I think its a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God?

They shoved off and picked up the paddles. They could see their breath. In the gray dawn the river smoked with tendrils of mist. No wind, the water glass-smooth. No sound but the current frilling the stones of the bank. No bird chatter, no crickets. The river and the burns on either side were very still, the only movement there the tatters of flame worrying the biggest fallen logs.

Pete half smiled. It was his way of giving vigorous applause.

He would have given his own life gladly to hear her sing to him one more time.

In the World According to Celine and Pete the very best part of every town was the library.

God may have made the world for the last week of September. Celine had thought that about Vermont when she was a child, and she thought that now. They drove along the Yellowstone River in mobile sunshine that tugged cloud shadows over the ridges and into the canyon.

What is evil? What do you think it is? She didn't think for more than a second. She tossed her loose gray hair off the side of her face and said, "Impediment to Being.

This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back.