Quotes from William Kent Krueger

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, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.

He held happiness in his hand easy as if he'd just, I don't know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground.

Oh the secrets of the night.

And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it's only a moment's pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road.

If it was true, as Henry Meloux said, that he'd heard the Windigo call his name, he understood why now. Because it felt exactly as if his heart had just been torn out of him and devoured.

people are most afraid of things they don't understand, and if something frightened you, you should get closer to it. That didn't mean it wouldn't still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew was easier to handle than the awful you imagined. So

understood he was crying. Someone

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

On July 3, 1999, a cluster of thunderstorms developed in the Black Hills area of South Dakota and began to track to the northeast.

what is God but the whole of that river? When I look back at the summer of 1932, I see a boy not quite thirteen doing his best to pin down God, to corral that river and give it a form he could understand. Like so many before him, he shaped it, and reshaped it, and shaped it again, and yet it continued to defy all his logic. I would love to be able to call out to him and tell him in a kindly way that reason will

do him no good, that it's pointless to rail about the difficulty of the twists in that river, and that he shouldn't worry about where the current will take him, but I confess that even after more than eighty years of living, I still struggle to understand what I know in my heart is a mystery beyond human comprehension. 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

In the simple way of the wild daisies that grew in the grass of the pasture behind our home she offered the beauty of herself without pretension.

leaning hard into the wind in order to complete the job expected of him. He was an Eagle

It was a city built on promise, on compromise, on inspiration and empty rhetoric both, on history poorly remembered and easily bent, and once in a while, on good people with the best of intentions who battled against the distrust, misdirection, and deceit that was politics as usual. (Referring to Washington, D.C.)

Not forget. Accept. We do what we can, and then we let go and accept that the hand of Kitchimanidoo, the Great Mystery, is at work in all things. In you, me, Mariah, this shining big water. And even in this Windigo, though we may not understand how this is so.

with hand-painted flowers.

faith, to embrace hope, and to bear your love before you like a burning candle, for I promise that it will light your way.

I lay on the straw matting, thinking about how much I'd hated Albert when I believed that he'd toadied out on us. And I thought about how much I loved him right at that moment, though I would never have told him so.

When my mother finally sang it was not just a hymn she offered, it was consummate comfort. She sang slowly and richly and delivered the heart of that great spiritual as if she was delivering heaven itself and her face was beautiful and full of peace. I shut my eyes and her voice reached out to wipe away my tears and enfold my heart and assure me absolutely that Bobby Cole was being carried home.

The demons that plague you are patient horrors. You may think that you've dealt with them, driven them out with logic, put them to rest with prayer, but they're never really gone. They're always with you. And why? Because they're not things separate from you. They are you.

Funerals weren't just about the dead. They were about the dead leaving this world to reside with God, someone Mother wasn't seeing eye to eye with at the moment, if she ever had, and I couldn't shake the concern that in the middle of the service she would spring from her pew and find some way to spite him.

body heals itself, but there is a scar.

And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it's only a moment's pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle." "Nf-six," my

And Celia, once she began, talked in a line no straighter than a sloppy drunk could have walked.