Quotes from William Kent Krueger

I didn't believe in one god, I decided. I believed in many, all at war with one another, and lately it was the Tornado God who seemed to have the edge.

That is one thing love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear's worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.

You can keep company with despair, or you can choose a different companion.

what I was wondering was how it is that you're able to capture on film the soul of nature." 'The soul of nature?" Willy laughed easily, as if genuinely and pleasantly surprised. "The spirit of the Great Mystery is how I think of it. It's something we can't name or even comprehend. We can only allow ourselves to be a part of it and, in that way, know it.

the young woman was either a superb actress or had truly felt, as most women ultimately did, the utter betrayal of love. The

I understood that the past is never really past. We live out history over and over, the worst of our memories right there alongside us, step for step, our companions to the grave.

NOTHING IS EVER everything, but the loss of a true love feels that way.

Cork had no idea what passed between them, though he could guess about part of it. In his own mind it was, as Henry Meloux had said long ago, that there were spiritual bonds connecting certain people, that they were two sides of the same leaf, two halves of a broken stone, and that it was not about love, as most people thought of that word, but about a wholeness that was there when the two parts came together.

We erect fences. We build walls. And what does that invite? Hostility breeds hostility. Fear breeds fear.

the truth about our government, any government for that matter, is that protecting its citizens is never its first priority. Its first priority is protecting itself.

The law wasn't perfect, but anytime those who had the power to twist it did so, it grew more grotesque.

I think that it wasn't so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out. You

I think Kitchimanidoo is not the Creator but the possibility of creation, all creation, good and bad.

He thought often these days of the words that ended the traditional marriage ceremony of the Anishinaabeg. You will share the same fire. You will hang your garments together. You will help one another. You will walk the same trail. You will look after one another. Be kind to one another. Be kind to your children. He hadn't always been careful to abide by these simple instructions. But a man could change

The whole smallpox on a blanket thing. Bounties on our scalps. The government schools, which were really an attempt to drive the Indian out of us and to get free labor in the bargain.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us exactly what they are: faith, hope, and love.

The Great Mystery." This was one of the more poetic interpretations of Kitchimanidoo, which was also translated as the Great Spirit or sometimes the Creator. Stephen, in his efforts at spiritual understanding, had come to believe that whatever you called this spirit—God, Allah, Kitchimanidoo—it was an integrated consciousness on a cosmic scale, the interconnectedness of all creation.

And I thought, as I had so many times before, that what's important to a human being, any human being, isn't the wealth that comes from money, but the richness that comes from community, a sense of connectedness to family and to friends and, as Rainy and Henry would probably have said, to the spirit of the Great Mystery that runs through all creation.

Because they believe a thing does not make it so. There is no dignity in anger. But

His father had been murdered fifteen hundred miles away. He was just gone. He became the emptiness of the cabin, and that's how Ren had thought of death. Emptiness. A grabbing at air. A conversation stopped in mid-sentence. A body from which the soul had simply departed.

It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another's, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow.

There is a deeper hurt than anything sustained by the body, and it's the wounding of the soul. It's the feeling that you've been abandoned by everyone, even God. It's the most alone you'll ever be. A wounded body heals itself, but there is a scar.

It's so quiet you can hear the dark sliding down the sky.

Straight is my path. Straight is my mind. Straight is my heart. Straight is my speech. Kind will I be to my brothers and sisters. Kind will I be to beast and bird. He