Quotes from Peter Heller

It's early spring, some late or very early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him.

He was not surprised that a tear hit the page, nor that he spread it on the paper with his thumb as he had before.

One tentacled candelabra

And a spiderweb's gleamings in the exposed roots of a cut bank. And in a tailwater pool: the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain.

He had learned that it was much less a distraction than a form of connection: of connecting to the best part of himself, and to a discipline that demanded he stay open to every sense, to the nuances of the season and to the instrument of his own body, his own agility or fatigue.

He poured the two stainless travel mugs full of the steeped tea and shook brown sugar into his and stirred it with a twig and sat on his log and couldn't relax.

The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything.

Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.

One weird thing: the GPS still works. The satellites, the military or whoever put them up there to spin around us and tell us where we are, they still send their signals, triangulate my position, the little Garmin mounted on the yoke still flashes a terrain warning if it thinks I am getting too close to high ground.

What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It's harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.

Ich lache. Ich johle. Ziemlich morbide. Jasper wirft mir von der Seite einen peinlich berührten Hundeblick zu.

You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.

The thing about old friends is that they never want you to change.

Now in her mid-sixties, she had "common-lawed"—her words—old Ansel, who used to manage ranches in California and now spent most of his days rereading the Russians. Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin. Ren had once asked him why he loved them, as he himself found the going mostly too dour. "I don't love them," Ansel had said. "You don't?" "Nothing worth serious study is lovable.

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. It

Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all.

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps

What I'd noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

A husk of herself that had been a barrier I hadn't even been aware of. And in the sloughing off, she opened and flowered. Corny, huh? Not really. Magical. I mean to watch a person let go of something and flower. I wouldn't know what it is she let go of.

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes.… Free from death. We alone see that: the free creature has its progress always behind it, and God before it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity, as streams do. She