“Low branches, dead and snapping against us. On the lookout for rattlesnakes. But the path was short enough, and soon we were on a kind of terrace. Old lawn overgrown by grass and weed, old concrete cracked in discrete chunks, vast areas overrun. An enchanted place for me, and only for me, because I was too young to remember, and so in my mind this place could become more.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“That night longer than all my life before it. No scale or measure in this world can ever be held constant. We are always slipping.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“WE THINK OF CAIN AS THE ONE WHO KILLED HIS BROTHER, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
“Yalnızca biz değil, bizden önceki herkes için de olduğu gibi, ıstırap çekmenin ve insan ömrünün bir simgesi olarak kendi haçını taşıyan İsa için de olduğu gibi, hayat tekrardan ibarettir. Tüm hikâyelerimizde bizler şu yeryüzünde bir ağırlığı sürükleyip taşırız. Buna Çile denir. İsa, kendimize acımamızın hikâyesidir.”
― David Vann, quote from Goat Mountain
David Vann
Born place: in Adak, Alaska, The United States
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“The souvenir hunters were prowling among them, carefully ripping insignia off tunics, slipping rings off fingers, or pistols off belts. There was Souvenirs himself, stepping gingerly from corpse to corpse, armed with his plyers and a dentist flashlight that he had had the forethought to purchase in Melbourne. I stood among the heaps of dead, they lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels, and the substance had leapt out. The mysteries of the universe had once inhabited these lulling lumps, had given each an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a special habit of address or a way with words or a knack of putting color on canvas. They had been so different then, now they were nothing, heaps of nothing. Can a bullet or a mortar fragment do this? Does this force, this mystery, I mean this soul, does this spill out on the ground along with the blood? No. It is somewhere, I know it. For this red and yellow lump I look down upon this instant was once a man. And the thing that energized him, the word that gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, the word from a higher word this cannot have been obliterated by a quarter inch of heated metal. The mystery of the universe has departed him and it is no good to say that the riddle is solved. The mystery is over because it has changed residences. The thing that shaped the flare of that nostril, that broadened that arm now bleeding, that wrought so fine that limply lying hand, that thing exists still and has still the power to flare that nostril, to bend that arm to clench that fist exactly as it did before. Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned-you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew-no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.”
― Robert Leckie, quote from Helmet for My Pillow
“I turn and gaze at the
bright blue sky, squinting. It’s like surfacing for air after
giving up hope, after resigning to drown, suffocating”
― Katie Klein, quote from Cross My Heart
“Gemellus, who had loved and worshiped her from afar, she who was in his arms now...”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from Keys to the Repository
“I'd learned balance is internal; that there really wasn’t one set formula for how to live your life nor how to handle the wife-mother-businesswoman juggling act. Maybe it was just being tuned in to every role and knowing when one or the other needed to be the focus.”
― Kaira Rouda, quote from Here, Home, Hope
“I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now i wish i could distinguish them.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Murder of Quality
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