Quotes from Peter Heller

What wind there was died to a breath they could barely feel.

Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can't say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that.

In my position with the first reports coming in I should have known. She sat up straight on her haunches and she cried silently.

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman's screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

life does not get less strange.

broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.

Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don't say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness.

Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they'd been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with a bird flu. We called it the Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and blamed on New Delhi. But that's probably not where it originated.

Distantly recall. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That's what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter.

People need people, more than any other being needs any other being, and Jack thought as he sifted the remnants of the nightmare that the need makes us particularly vulnerable.

It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. That they endured in the weather and the seasons.

That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that. As simple as that we go over the edge.

In truth, Celine never went too long without eating. HALT. It was her AA training. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired - don't let yourself become any of those, if you can help it.

other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably

There were curtains of night gray that curved against the wind and in them it was almost as if he could see the lives of his mother and of his best friend, their spirits, coming to him. It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark.

And in each loss was some further exile. Celine wondered just then what the word "home" must mean to her. Probably a space within the relative safety of her own skin.

Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not knowing it. Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it's too late.

I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

was more than a warrior's creed, it was a reminder that we are entrusted with certain souls, and that we are beholden in a broader sense, as people, to take care of others.

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. Leave his venison in the trail for the coyotes the jays. And. You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in the water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell.

Rich people are another species. Sort of lost in their own way. It's a good thing they have country clubs and shit because it keeps them kinda corralled up in one place. Jack had surely decided that neither one in that marriage of scientists was very appetizing.