“Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled the junkyards with crushed metal. Crosses garlanded with flowers and keepsakes marked roadsides where they'd died. You could see it coming in the smirking yearbook photos they'd left behind.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“Something Rich and Strange
She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“Something Rich and Strange
She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“A Servant of History
Her eyes were of the lightest blue as if time had rinsed away most of the colour, but there was a liveliness inside them.”
― Ron Rash, quote from Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories
“E eu via prados e declives, gretas de penhascos cobertas de grama, flores, fetos e musgos, aos quais a velha voz popular dera nomes tão singulares e tão cheios de significações. Viviam, filhos e netos que são das montanhas, coloridos e inofensivos, ali mesmo nos seus postos. Eu os apalpava, contemplava-os, aspirava-lhes o perfume e aprendia seus nomes. Impressionava-me ainda mais séria e profundamente com a contemplação das árvores. Via cada uma delas levando sua vida à parte, aperfeiçoando sua forma e coroa especiais, projetando sua sombra peculiar. A mim me pareciam ermitãs e lutadoras, mais estreitamente aparentadas com as montanhas, pois cada uma delas, sobretudo as que se erguiam nos pontos mais altos das montanhas, mantinham sua luta silenciosa e tenaz pela existência e desenvolvimento, contra o vento, o tempo e as rochas. Cada qual tinha que suportar seu próprio peso e se agarrar com força ao solo, resultando daí que cada uma possuía uma forma particular e chagas especiais. Havia pinheiros aos quais as tormentas só permitiam que apresentassem galhos de um só lado, e outros cujos troncos avermelhados se haviam enroscado, quais serpentes, ao redor de rochas, de tal maneira que árvores e rochas se agarravam umas às outras para se sustentarem. A mim elas se assemelhavam a guerreiros e despertavam no meu coração um sentimento de medo e de respeito. (p. 8)”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind
“There were many times when logic was of no comfort.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from Deep Water
“Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
“If you have seen my YouTube documentary that was the genesis for this book entitled The 2012 Enigma,1 my Web site, Divine Cosmos,2 or some of my television appearances, you probably know I do not believe our future is depressing, terrifying or cataclysmic.”
― David Wilcock, quote from The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies
“Between the last glimmer of morning stars above, and the size of the leaves beneath me, the mountains provided one last blow to my ego—my sense of belonging to this universe—and made all else seem insignificant by comparison. “It’s”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Half Way Home
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