Quotes from Silas House

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, doesn't it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.

Any two people can set and jaw all day long, but it takes two people right for each other to set together and just be quiet.

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.

In New York, the buildings are like mountains in some ways, but they are only alive because of the people living in them. Real mountains are alive all over.

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

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer...but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

Now I had seen the grief of the two strongest people I knew. And somehow, Daddy's and Edie's crying made them seem even stronger to me. It was better to cry than to suck it up and go around conjuring hate in your heart

Maybe all the trees were God.--A Parchment of Leaves

I wondered if we were put on this earth only to destroy every beautiful thing, to make chaos. Or were we meant to overcome this? Did bad things happen so that goodness could show through in people?

When he was nearly thirty-six, my brother Jem got his heart badly broken when his fourth marriage fell apart, mostly because his wife never could get used to Boo, who lived with them and creeped her out by making little wooden dolls of her and putting them in the hollow tree out front.

I appricated that Nell was talking to me like a grown-up, but I had no idea what she meant. Still, I could see that the words flowed together like water over a riverbed.

Writing is a supernatural thing.

Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world, Justin 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.

I wondered if the trees were God. They were like God in many respects: they stood silent, and most people only noticed them when the need arose.

It's more important to show him how to be good to people than how to judge them.

Learn how to forgive others, including yourself.

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 knowed 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.

Autumn air is good for the lungs.

When Clay was little, newscasters boasted that the War on Poverty was being waged in those very mountains, but if the government had fought any battles close to Free Creek, no one in the holler heard the guns.

Surely there is a light in that boy that will never go out, no matter what he has to face along the way. That's all a father can hope for his child, that a little fire will burn in them to keep them going, to keep them strong.

Since that night I have come to understand that sometimes the best families of all are those that we create ourselves, the people we choose to be with.

Later in my life I would come to understand that history books are the least reliable witnesses

But in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.