“All I'm trying to tell you is to be strong. Don't ever let nothing get you down. Don't be afraid or ashamed to love, or to grieve when the thing you love is gone. Just don't let it throw you, no matter how much it hurts.”
― Patrick D. Smith, quote from A Land Remembered
“Perhaps animals are smarter than men, he thought, taking only what they need to live today leaving something for tomorrow.”
― Patrick D. Smith, quote from A Land Remembered
“said. “That breech loader has killed everthing but a train engine, and now it’s done that too.”
― Patrick D. Smith, quote from A Land Remembered
“they rode back she pressed against him, her face on his shoulder, her hands burning his chest like a branding iron.”
― Patrick D. Smith, quote from A Land Remembered
“We’re breaking a Seminole rule already.”
― Patrick D. Smith, quote from A Land Remembered
Patrick D. Smith
Born place: in D'Lo, Mississippi, The United States
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“No one charged you with being my savior,” Camille’s voice shook, the confrontation not something she really wanted.
“No one had to charge me with it. I made the decision on my own the night the Christina went down.” Oscar sealed his lips as if he’d let something slip he hadn’t intended.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, her boots slipping once on the moss. He avoided her by looking out at the stream. He took a few moments to answer, and when he did he still didn’t meet her stare.
“Do you remember when you woke up on the Londoner? When you asked me if I’d seen your father?”
Camille nodded, and hoped their argument was over. “You said you didn’t see him.”
He shook his head. “I lied. I did see him in the water. He was trying to stay above the surface after I got ahold of the dory.”
It was as though freezing shocks of ocean water were striking Camille in the face all over again. She jumped from the rock, the hem of her skirt nearly tripping her.
“Did you row to him? Did you try and save him?”
He shook his head again. “No.”
“Why not?” she screeched. “Oscar, how could you not help him?” She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t do anything but stare at him in disbelief. He’d abandoned her father, the man who had given him everything.
“Because I spotted you,” he answered, hardly loud enough for her to hear. “I saw you in the waves and I chose to row to you.”
She loosened her fists, stunned.
Oscar sat down on the rock, the toes of his scuffed leather boots buried in the dry layer of pine needles.
“I tried to go back for him,” he said, kicking at the needles, “but by the time I pulled you out of the water and looked back, he was gone.”
She couldn’t move, could barely breathe. If she’d only held on to her father’s hand. Oscar would have been able to save them both.
“If there had just been a way to get to the both of you,” he said.
Camille sat on the rock beside him, laying a tentative hand on his arm. “You’re the most capable man I know, Oscar. If there had been a way, you’d have found it.”
She pressed her hand against his solid arm, the flaxen hairs covering his skin coarse against her fingertips. She wanted to soothe him more, reassure him like he always did her.”
― Angie Frazier, quote from Everlasting
“It wasn’t that she didn’t want to die. Nor was it that she wanted to live. She just didn’t want to give up.”
― Fuyumi Ono, quote from The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow
“It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti
“Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole and with a terrific crash, that sounded and resounded for miles and miles of flei, Will fell into the long grass.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage
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