Quotes from David Joy

Empathy's not standing over a hole looking down and saying you understand. Empathy is having been in that hole yourself.

It's funny how it only takes one person taking the time to show you they care for all that bad shit to not seem so bad for a moment. It's not like the demons go anywhere. What haunts you is still right there when you go back under, but that one gesture from one person can bring you to the surface for a second or two. And for a very long time, all I'd really needed was to come up for air.

Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.

Some souls aren't worth saving, I thought. There're some souls that even the devil wants no part of.

Light never shined on a man like me and that was certain. In a lot of ways, that made men like Daddy the lucky ones to have only ever known the darkness. Knowing only darkness, a man doesn't have to get his heart broken in search of the light. I envied him for that.

You still can't see it and it's right in front of your eyes. It's the reason we're gathered here. The only reason we're here is because of the ones we loved. That the line that held us.

Dwayne understood that his brother was not meant for this place, that some people were born too soft to bear the teeth of this world. There was no place for weakness in a world like this. Survival was so often a matter of meanness.

What I'm saying is that it's easy to take the high road so long as there aren't any stakes. But the minute you've got something to lose, a man'll do all sorts of things.

There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.

Eventually all of that pain and anger just sort of fades away, and all we're left with is growing old and forgetting.

It wasn't here or there that had ever been scary. It was the middle ground, that long desolate space between, that scared the hell out of me.

I wasn't old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he'd never have to love her again.

It had never been that addicts don't care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.

The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface's roiling a reflection of what's buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden.

Most of us knew things that we didn't even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used.

I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I'd wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something.

There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration. Life is sustained by death, and though going to the field is an act of taking responsibility for that fact, the killing is not easy, nor should it be.

The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.

Holding onto history is not nearly as important as where we're headed. Pride matters less than power.

At the end of the day that statue is nothing more than a chunk of granite and copper sitting in front of the library. That statue matters a lot less than the end goal. Holding onto history is not nearly as important as where we are headed. Pride matters less than power.