Quotes from William Kent Krueger

Vox populi," Belle says. "The voice of the people.

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.

I lay in the dark thinking about the bitterness inside the pig scarer and the sadness that was there, too, and I figured they were probably twins joined at the hip.

Few things were so sure and simple that they could be taken at face value.

Since I first entered this world, what awaits has always been before me. If I turn this way or that, it is still there, waiting, more patient than any human being.

When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war.

Sam Winter Moon had cautioned him long ago that it was best to believe in all possibilities, that there were more mysteries in the world than a man could ever hope to understand. 13

I need some-" Cork thought a moment. "I was going to say advice, but the truth is, I need some guidance, Tom." "We all do sometimes. It's not always easy to admit.

Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future. One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.

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.

She gave Mother Beal a look I couldn't, at that age, interpret but I have since come to think of as profound maternal compassion, a strength emanating from a deep well of endurance that, across my life, I've come to understand was not particular to Sarah Schofield. I've witnessed it in other women who have suffered much without losing their hope or their gift for embracing with forgiveness those who are broken.

When darkness comes over your soul, it doesn't come in light shades; it descends with all the black of a moonless night.

I'm a teacher of history in a high school in Saint Paul and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

there was probably something different about everybody and Karl's way of being different was no worse than anybody else's.

Anger, hate, jealousy, envy, fear. Fill your pockets with these heavy stones and you spend your life trying not to drown. Throw them away and you float. The great current of life simply sweeps you up and carries you joyously to the place you were always meant to come to. Make no mistake, you will arrive there either way, through struggle or surrender. But one is the way of pain, the other of peace.

The daytime. The nighttime. Eating. Just lying here thinking. Nothing feels right. I keep waiting for her to come up the stairs and poke her head into our room and, you know, goof around with us." "I know what you mean," I said. "What do we do, Frank?" "I think we just keep going on. We keep doing what we always do and someday it'll feel right again." "Will it? Really?" "Yeah, I think so.

And, Jake, there's going to be lots in this world you're going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?

I thought if you loved someone you were supposed to, like, forgive them. I thought that was what love was supposed to be all about." Cork shook his head: "Easy to say, harder to do.

There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have.

Whenever hope packed its bag and left for good, all that remained was a terrible emptiness, immeasurably sad.

Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me

We entered a period in which every moment was weighted with both the absolute necessity of hope and a terrible and almost unbearable anticipation of the worst.

There is a river that runs through time and the universe, vast and inexplicable, a flow of spirit that is at the heart of all existence, and every molecule of our being is a part of it. And what is God but the whole of that river? … Perhaps the most important truth I've learned across the whole of my life is that it's only when I yield to the river and embrace the journey that I find peace.

Only God is perfect, Odie. To the rest of us, he gave all kinds of wrinkles and cracks." She lifted her hair from her cheek, showing me the long scar there. "If we were perfect, the light he shines on us would just bounce right off. But the wrinkles, they catch the light. And the cracks, that's how the light gets inside us. When I pray, Odie, I never pray for perfection. I pray for forgiveness, because it's the one prayer I know will always be answered.