“The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.”
“Couldn’t get no closer and couldn’t get no further away.”
“The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.”
“That boy,” he said. “I’ve done him ever favor I could. Some folks you can’t do nothing with. Just sorry. God knows I’ve done plenty of drinking and stuff in my time, but I be damn if I ever tried to cheat anybody out of any money.”
“In the countryside by nights without the moon, there sometimes roamed an indigent, a recycled reject with eyes sifting the darkness and sorting the scattered scents, walking beside deep hollows and ditches of stinking water. The hours he kept were usually reserved for the drunk and the sleeping. With his sloe-lidded eyes that in the daytime tried to hide from the sun, he spied treasures all over the land. No thing unlocked was safe from his grasp, he who could squat in the road and talk to the dogs and still their dying growls, all save one”
“But before either of us can speak again, I feel crackle-crackle-crackle. I can't tell what's going to happen next. My seizure begins to spin slowly through me. What will my dad do? Whatever it is, in another moment I'll be flying free. Either way, whatever he does, I'll be soaring.”
“Whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding
as it should.”
“Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East . . .
On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert - Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes.
In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich meridian . . .
And the trains went from East to West, and from West to East . . .”
“I also read that spending time with a pedophile can be like a drug high. There was this girl who said it’s as if the pedophile lives in a fantastic kind of reality, and that fantasticness infects everything. Kind of like they’re children themselves, only full of the knowledge that children don’t have. Their imaginations are stronger than kids’ and they can build realities that small kids would never be able to dream up. They can make the child’s world… ecstatic somehow. And when it’s over, for people who’ve been through this, it’s like coming off of heroin and, for years, they can’t stop chasing the ghost of how it felt. One girl said that it’s like the earth is scorched and the grass won’t grow back. And the ground looks black and barren but inside it’s still burning.”
“She is all that is gracious, Her spirit is comely, The work of her hands is fair.”
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