Quotes from John Hart

We can all live with doubts. It's the knowing that breaks us. Iron House

Then she turned for the great mouth of a door, and by the time it inhaled her, she was a much older woman.

I'd been awake for thirty-six hours and driving for ten. Restless weeks, sleepless nights, and the decision stole into me like a thief. I never planned to go back to North Carolina- I'd buried it- but I blinked and found my hands on the wheel, Manhattan a sinking island to the north. I wore a week-old beard and three day denim, felt stretched by an edginess that bordered on pain, but no one here would fail to recognize me. That's what home was all about, for good or bad.

Disgust was an organ in Hunt's gut. The more he thought about it, the more it churned.

For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own. But that's the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that's the way he rolled - his path, his choices, and no looking back.

I'm sixty-nine years old, and I have no plans to run for reelection. Do you think I give a damn?

We can live with doubts," Jessop said "It's the knowing that breaks us.

Our questions, which began politely, were politely ignored.

It is in suffering that we are withdrawn from the sway of time and mere things, and find ourselves in the presence of profounder truth.

Jack laughed, and the sound frightened him because there was no rationality in it. It sounded broken and wild, and that's exactly how childhood with Johnny had ended, not in quietness and time, but in a sudden rush of secrets and death and superstitious dread.

Where Johnny chose to see cause and effect, Jack saw the hand of God, and of the devil himself. That wasn't hyperbole or false belief; he knew it like he knew his bones: that the world ran shadowed and deep, that evil was real and had a face. Because of that, Jack sought order, solidity, control.

Even in a place like this, there are dark corners.

We crossed through cornfields and soy, a new planting of loblolly pines

as dark did with light and weakness with strength. Nothing was simple or pure;

I'm a killer, not a thief.

It was a paradox of life behind walls, that where any day could end in blood, every morning contrived to start exactly the same. A man woke and, for two beats of his heart, didn't know where he was or what he'd become. Those few seconds were magic, a warm flicker before reality walked across his chest, the black dog of remembrance trailing at its feet.

The gray light was unforgiving, and the road in was a hard, fast slide to the bottom rung of the human experience.

The silence inside was familiar from all the years of mourning, a large house with parts of its soul carved away.

Go to hell. Come back burning.

Unsettle the mind; destroy the balance. Destroy the balance; obliterate the man.

We the unwilling, led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.

The mind wanders and the mouth, it seems, is more than willing to follow.

But childhood was not all good, nor were its lessons. Good came with the bad, as dark did with light and weakness with strength. Nothing was simple or pure; everyone had secrets. What

Cedar," he said. "Pine. Spruce. Laurel." "Yeah. So?" "They're supposed to be sacred." He touched them again, each in turn. "Wisdom. Strength. Courage. Perseverance. You're supposed to burn them.