Quotes from Peter Heller

He felt wreathed in the music of language, and as long as he heard it and could write it down, as long as the pulse was in his veins, he didn't care if he lived out of the back of a truck or in some crappy rent-by-the-week for the rest of his life.

My favorite poem, the one by Li Shang-Yin: When Will I Be Home? When will I be home? I don't know. In the mountains, in the rainy night, The Autumn lake is flooded. Someday we will be back together again. We will sit in the candlelight by the West window. And I will tell you how I remembered you Tonight on the stormy mountain.

Chicksaw seemed to be pieced together like his shack, which was growing on her. The place looked haphazard, but on closer inspection everything seemed to have a function. ... The same for the man: If he'd been a quilt it would look at first glance very primitive, even crazy in its pattern. But study it a little closer and one might see some fine stitching and some very curious patches.

This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is—well you can't even look at it.

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting.

She had taught him almost everything he knew about moving through the world with some semblance of grace, and he tried to live it and bumbled often and tried again. She had taught him courage in the landscapes of the imagination, and to find the joy in things when he was afraid.

It was not real. Jack looked around and thought that the Inferno was not credible: not because the details of Hell were beyond the pale—they were—but because of the unshakable equanimity of Virgil.

It's very hard to be a boy, " Celine commented dryly. "You're never sure whether to love something or kill it.

Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.

his conscience was clear and he had faith in the essential goodness of the universe and so felt cradled by it.

If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn't even stick around for it. Time present and time future.

If they swapped jokes, she asked them what the Zero said to the Eight: "Nice belt!

The way things ought to be. A turning of seasons and a natural acceptance of life pulling back and many things passing. There was a kind of relief in that, and a sharp beauty. Whose power had much to do with one's ability to hold the losses it augured.

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away.

No shit," Jack murmured. He was truly awed and relieved. The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

like We Die Alone, about the Norwegian commando who outskied an entire Nazi division,

But every river story they had ever read was just beneath the surface of their imaginations and must have fired them with extra energy and braced them, too, because at least half of those stories did not have happy endings.

Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.

he didn't seem to mind being cold and wet or exhausted the way other people did. It wasn't fun, but then life wasn't meant to be that fun. That was the difference, Wynn thought. For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn't have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn't last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul. It gave Jack a strength, a temper, that Wynn admired.

The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn't say much, but he was aware enough—he'd read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.

Jack didn't want to throw shadow onto the trip; there was nothing worse on any expedition than a naysayer.

When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been.

Isn't that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love.