“Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.”
“Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.”
“there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.”
“Shared sorrow is lessened, shared joy is increased”
“And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!”
“Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.”
“it's better than a stick in the eye”
“He smiled like a sun lamp.”
“Hey Jake. I got an idea.'
'Be gentle with it,' the Doc grinned. 'It's in a strange place.”
“A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.”
“It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.”
“Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.”
“Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.”
“Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie — and the A-movie for that matter — that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.”
“There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance.”
“She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.”
“What shocked us the most was that we had no idea why we should be so shocked. Like opening a ginger ale and finding Jamesons' inside: nothing wrong with it, but it sort of takes you by surprise.”
“A surprising percentage of your own society, with all your heritage of murder, would like to believe that Life survives by going to the supermarket. So the ideal would be to train cattle to make butcher knives and take turns cutting each other up at a convenient location.”
“The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten.”
“Corinne told us that revolution was brewing in the hills to the north, under the leadership of a man named Miranda, who with absurd inevitability had styled himself El Supremo.”
“La vida no es sino una continua sucesión de oportunidades para sobrevivir”
“You didn’t have to adjust under the watchful eye of Gabriel Keene.” “You’re right. I only had to adjust under the watchful eye of Ethan Sullivan. That was an utter cakewalk.”
“Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.”
“Do you know what I wish for, Levi, what I hope and pray for all the time?” “What, bella mia?” “That people have one thought, one instinct: Be kind-hearted. Simply be kind of heart.”
“While there was still water in the middle of the pools, animals attempted to reach it through the silt but would get bogged. We spent day after day checking dams, finding about eight to ten animals hopelessly mired in the silt at each and every dam, primarily kangaroos and wallabies.
We had to get to the dams early in the morning. Some of the kangaroos had been struggling all night. Steve engineered planks and straps to rescue the animals. The silt would suck us down just as fast, so we had to be careful going out to rescue the roos. Because of the lactic acid buildup in their tissues (a product of their all-night exertions to free themselves), some of the kangaroos were too far gone and couldn’t recover. But we saved quite a few.
At one point, Bob came out to lend a hand. I was at the homestead, and the ovulation strip turned bright blue. I hustled over to the creek bed where Steve and his dad were working.
I motioned to Steve. “The strip is blue,” I said. He looked around nervously.
“I’m out here working with me dad,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just come on,” I whispered impatiently.
“But my dad’s right here!”
I smiled and took his hand. We headed up the dry creek bed and spent some quality time with the biting ants and the prickles.
It was after this trip to our conservation property in the Brigalow Belt that I discovered I was pregnant. I tried to let Steve know by sitting down at the table and tucking into a bowl of ice cream and pickles.
“What are you doing?” asked a totally confused Steve. I explained, and we were both totally overjoyed, keeping our fingers crossed for a boy to go along with our darling daughter.”
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