Quotes from Jess Walter

He had never really mastered English, but he'd studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog.

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person?

Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare.

I fell in love with my country—its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. . . . It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. —Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Divination of true nature. Of motivation. Of desirous hearts. I saw the whole world in a flash and I recognized it at once: We want what we want.

Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out.

But anyone who has been in love knows that love is just the beginning. You learn more every day, every year, every decade, and not just about the object of your affection, but about yourself, and about the nature of love itself, and eventually, about the nature of loss.

En zelfs als ze niet vinden waarnaar ze op zoek zijn, is het dan niet voldoende om samen in het zonlicht te lopen?

Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility?

the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can't stop you from looking around.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera   T

the scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound--when the truth was tat it had all been done a million billion times.

Oh, she said, that, and loosened her grip. She must've heard this question a hundred times, because she turned away and looked out the window. There's meat sewn in the corset, she said more quietly. Beef liver and offal. She shrugged. Provides some extra here, too. She patted her chest. The cat knows that if he growls but refrains from biting, he'll get a fine meal. And now she glanced at the driver again. Me too, I guess. If I growl, but don't bite, I get to eat.

You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it.

Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.

Automobiles and horse wagons filled the streetcar's wake, and Rye stood at that intersection for a long time, staring at the tracks. The whole country was laced together with tracks. He could get on a train and end up in New York City if he wanted, and this felt like another reverie, or a premonition. The world was becoming a single place.

on the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . .

the water. The feral cats scattered before her.

For several seconds, they stand there, ...just four feet apart now, but separated by a thick granite counter, by fifty years and two fully lived lives. No one speaks. No one breathes.

If every event is part of the fabric of the conspiracy, then everything must have a reason, a meaning.

but the very idea scandalized her. "What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he is dead?

Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon—but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.

Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.