Quotes from Silas House

Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Maybe all the secrets of life were written on the surface of leaves, waiting to be translated. If I touched them long enough, I might be given some information no one else had.

Whole scenes of your life slip away forever if you don't put them down in ink.

Paul told him everything about quilting, things he would never remember, but he savored each word as if they were lost verses of Scripture.

There had been a time when he would have thought this serendipity happened because God was on his side. Now he sees the arrogance of that thought.

Zealots are always ready to take over. No one ever thought it could happen here, but we were overestimating human beings. Turns out it's easy to convert more people to a cause that takes power from others, that thrives on meanness.

Whole scenes of your life can slip away forever if you don't put them down in ink.

I hoped that I would give to my marriage the same nurturing that I found easy to give to the corn and the tomatoes. Raising a garden and keeping a marriage in shape are not that different.

God is in everything and everybody.

There is so much writ upon the parchment of leaves, So much of beauty blown upon the winds, I can but fold my hands and sink my knees In the leaf pages. —James Still

Her granny used to say, We've always been poor as Job's turkey and most likely always will be.

Why I left, I don't know. I have never found a place of more beautiful night sounds, have never found a place where I so completely belonged despite being different.

Mamaw says this is the problem with a lot of politicians. "They want to do right, but they're too scared to," she says.

There is an animal in all of us who knows how to survive.

Terror does things to you. It hardens a part of you. I have heard people call others hard-hearted, but it's not your heart that turns to stone when something awful happens. It's your gut, where all real feelings come from. That was froze up inside me and I didn't long to thaw it.

The heat was thick as curtains. Night was fixing to slide over the world and the cicadas were calming down for that hushed time between daylight and darkness, when crickets rosined their bows.

You are so good. So good, you're always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you're gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, don't it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.

Some nights he thinks they are just a dream God is having

The thing that struck me the most about all these letters was his love for the trees.

It's time to get up now. You've got a child to tend to. A life to live. You have to put this behind you and go on.

It was as if I had been mute all my life and only now had discovered what words sounded like.

The internet needs as many good dogs and books as it can get right now.

She had woken up with the song swirling around in her mind and couldn't make it sizzle down her arm and out onto the stiff strings of her fiddle.

All of this could have been different if both of his parents had taken a breath.