Quotes from Silas House

a moment in which we took into account everything we had, and appreciated it all, and felt blessed

She felt as if she had spent her childhood here, running, lying back, pulling out the stamens of honeysuckle to drink their juice.

Autumn settled itself down over the land like a colorful skirt. Dusk came earlier and touched the leaves with sharp breath. The hills were filled with the smoke from smoldering patches of forest fires.

There were too many twists & turns to this story, too many oddly shaped pieces to fit into this quilt.

He would think they were the tears of a simple woman and he'd not have the sense to see that she was crying because she was so angry.

Clay wished that he could piece the story of his mother together in the same way. He might find scraps of her life, stitch them together, and have a whole that he could pull up to his neck and feel warm beneath.

It would be a story made up of scraps, but that was all he had.

They all knew that she was serious and they all knew what she wasn't saying—that their land was the most important thing they had besides one another.

He had spent his whole life listening to stories from the past and now he had his own, and it was slowly building chapter by chapter.

Don't you have some songs, boyo?" she asked, after one of her songs. I didn't know any of them all the way through, but I sang the verses and choruses of all the songs we used to sing back on the Preserve: "Angel from Montgomery," "No Hard Feelings," "You Got Gold," "The Story.

He had that look of country music singers who never become stars nowadays, but always used to: square-jawed, handsome, but with too much worry on his face, too much living through the hard times. These days those men were the songwriters but not the singers.

There was nothing on yet except for the tobacco reports, so I snapped the radio back off and tried to figure out where to go.

Daylight is the time God moves about the best. I've heard people say that they liked to watch the world come awake. But the world is always awake; sunlight just makes it seeable. In that moment when light hit the mountain, when the sun cracked through the sky big enough to make a noise if our ears could hear it, I would be aware again of all the things that had been going on throughout the night. Morning just made it easier to hear. Light takes away muteness. I

When you have a child, you have to put things aside, though. You have to live for them, if not for yourself. I was aware of this. I knower that I could not let myself die inside, so I struggled through and made a way for myself. Most important, I tried to find a way to get joy into my life. I made a way for the possibility of joy. I looked for it anywhere I could find it. I got up early and stepped out onto the porch to see day come in.

She believed in not judging other people based on how they looked and in having what she called "an open mind.

A particular kind of patriotism, promises of adventure, finances. This is how boys end up soldiers.

thinks. All you do is just decide to do it, and then it's done. Instantly you feel better, like pushing aside a quilt that is too heavy for sleeping. Forgetting is the hard part.

Years later I would realize that this was one of the worlds great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose not to think, and that's how the whole world gets into trouble.

Years later I would realize that this was one of the world's great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose not to think, and that's how the whole world gets into trouble.

none of us can know the mind of God. He's too big for that.

That's what it means to be an American. To be free to love who and what you want, and to keep a lot in your heart at once.

believe in God, but I don't believe in church.

But a person can believe something so hard they lose sight of everything else.

And if there's one thing I know for sure it's that you never shun somebody because you don't agree with them. We're ever one of us children of God.