Quotes from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Well, sugar," she said, limping off, "don't be too hard on yourself. Now and again it's okay to let yourself off the hook."

But that was the trouble, wasn't it? Letting himself off the hook had been his way of life.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“...in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves...”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“He found the first skipped meals were the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third, the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally to only the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn't know how hungry you were, how empty you'd become. Wallace's visits had shown him that being lonesome was its own fast, that after going unnourished for so long, even the foulest bite could remind your body how much it needed to eat. That you could be starving and not even know it.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“He was tired of having only three channels.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The land had a way of covering the wrongs of people.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The visit hadn't lasted much longer, and Wallace never said what he'd done, but after Larry watched him go, he'd spent the rest of the night on his porch as daylight crept through the trees like am army of crafty boys.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Larry felt a strange forgiveness for him because all monsters were misunderstood.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“they say bad things come in threes, so we got our quota for a while ain’t we.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“You can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did. Maybe, after all this time, he'd started to believe their version of him.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Where’s that tree?” Larry said, thinking he might take Cindy. “Is the rope still there?” Glancing at him, his father said, “Naw.” “What happened to it?” “They cut it down. Mill did.” He pushed his plate aside and rose from the table. “Enjoyed it,” he said, got another beer from the refrigerator, and went into the den.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“smell of natural gas, piped from the big metal tank in the backyard, filled once a month by a truck.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“It was country dark, as Alice Jones had called these nights, the absence of any light but what you brought to the table. He sped up, his eyes focused on what was before him, and drove toward home.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Sound more mean than crazy,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to go”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“interviewing that people said he could make a stump confess to saying “timber.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“Bad cotton country meant good moonshining country.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“... that she might slip off into that space where she stared, go for good to whatever she kept watching.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

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“El amor verdadero no era precisamente uno de esos absolutos; pregunta en la cual la palabra <>, sin embargo, tenía tanto que ver con la empleada por Kant o Hegel como la palabra <> con un descarrilamiento o un terremoto, con sus aullidos y su sangre. Bruno respondía que, a su juicio, la calidad del amor que hay entre dos seres que se quieren cambia de un instante a otro, haciéndose de pronto sublime, bajando luego hasta la trivialidad, convirtiéndose más tarde en algo afectuoso y cómodo, para repentinamente convertirse en un odio trágico o destructivo".”
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“Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs.

Thank god. I don’t think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it’s on a hair trigger.

I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack.

“You’re okay.” Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He’s so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him.

“You’re okay,” he says again.

I like that, how he’s so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it.

You’re okay.

He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. “But if you’re going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart.” He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. “Here. Eat your feelings.”

I’m about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. “What . . . is that?”

“Pecan pie cookies,” says Rev. He’s taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. “I could live on them for days.”

I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. It is awesome.

I peer up at him sideways. “How did you know?”

He hesitates, but he doesn’t ask me what I mean. “I know the signs.”

“I’m going to get some sodas,” Rev says slowly, deliberately. “I’m going to bring you one. Blink once if that’s okay.”

I smile, but it feels watery around the edges. He’s teasing me, but it’s gentle teasing. Friendly. I blink once.

This is okay. I’m okay. Declan was right.

“Take it out on the punching bag,” calls Rev. “That’s what I do.”

My eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Do whatever you want,” says Declan. “As soon as we do anything meaningful, the baby will wake up.”

Rev returns with three sodas. “We’re doing something meaningful right now.”

“We are?” I say.

He meets my eyes. “Every moment is meaningful.”

The words could be cheesy—should be cheesy, in fact—but he says them with enough weight that I know he means them. I think of The Dark and all our talk of paths and loss and guilt.

Declan sighs and pops the cap on his soda. “This is where Rev starts to freak people out.”

“No,” I say, feeling like this afternoon could not be more surreal. Something about Rev’s statement steals some of my earlier guilt, to think that being here could carry as much weight as paying respects to my mother. I wish I knew how to tell whether this is a path I’m supposed to be on. “No, I like it. Can I really punch the bag?”

Rev shrugs and takes a sip of his soda. “It’s either that or we can break out the Play-Doh”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost

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