“Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn't paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that's love.”
“I trust you have seen the ocean. If you have, then you have witnessed the divine. How barren the ground is in comparison! If I could count the hours I have spent staring out at it! And yet those hours never feel lost. I cannot imagine how else I could refill them were I given a second chance.”
“I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.”
“Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.”
“Isn't it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.”
“Do you know what I miss most about Rosemary? Simply knowing she was there.”
“I suppose my greatest disappointment has been realizing my father, like Joseph and Brigham before him, tried to shroud his passions in the mantle of religion. He used God to defend his adultery. --- Ann Eliza Young, page 253”
“There is nothing more alarming to a boy than seeing a mother, or a father, buckling. It says to him that all will not be well. The boy does not know this, but he senses it, as a dog senses it, as a dog sense his master's true state of mind. (Lorenzo Dee)”
“What do I consider myself now? A man attempting to be good. In this endeavor I have no use for church and steeple. If another man does, I only wish he finds what he needs.”
“Isn't a gay Mormon like an oxymoron?'
'Do I look like an oxymoron to you?'
'An oxymormon.”
“You will loose everything"
"I already have.”
“I, of course, cherish my freedom, but I shall never want my freedom to restrict the freedom of another. In that case then I am not truly free, and none of us is truly free.”
“My duty, I know, is to lead. I cannot offer an array of options. I must offer a long but narrow path to Salvation, and guide the Saints down it. Were that path wide and varied, it would lead nowhere; and I will then have failed both God and man.”
“Upon the exposure of his bribery, it is reported he said, “I should have paid more.”
“Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many and never easy to explain”
“I write not for sensation, but for Truth. I leave judgement to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.”
“Under what circumstances does such outrage thrive? The territory of Utah, glorious as it may be, spiked by granite peaks and red jasper rocks, cut by echoing canyons and ravines, spread upon a wide basin of gamma grass and wandering streams, this land of blowing snow and sand, of iron, copper, and the great salten sea.”
“Under some Divine plan, it seems Destiny intended these two noble creatures to be united in either matrimony or warfare, if there is a difference. As the battle begins, we shall mount our hill with somber hearts to watch out over the carnage.”
“Sometimes when you’re driving down a back road in Utah, you think if there is a God, then he probably had something to do with all of this. It’s just that fucking beautiful.”
“I wish I could claim I faced my first day of apostasy with courage and certainty. Yet in truth, I had never felt more afraid.”
“Love and trust are Siamese twins, as conjoined as Chang and Eng.”
“Are these from you?”
The voice so startled me that I whirled around. Unfortunately, I was still holding the rake in
my hand. Even more unfortunately, the wooden handle caught him right along the side of his
face. He staggered back, stunned, the bottle of wine I’d just left at his door slipping from his
grasp and shattering on the path with a crash. The scent of merlot drifted up around us, canceling
out the smells of spring.
“Oops,” I said in a strangled voice.
“Jesus Christ, lady,” my new neighbor cursed, rubbing his cheek. “What is your problem?”
“Yggdrasil, despite its mass, did not appear completely solid. He could see through it at times, and it pulsed from corporeal to transient, fading in and out as though it could not decide if it wanted to exist or not. He”
“She was never going to be the kind of person who didn't stick out in all directions. To want it was the same as hating herself. That was the truth. She breathed those words. She could have repeated them a hundred times and they wouldn't have hurt any worse. Reality was stubborn for sure, but it was large and it had possibilities. It was a sweet relief when you let it come.”
“When he got to the shoe putting-on stage he called Hosain again. Putting on and taking off his own shoes and boots were activities at which he drew the line if there was a man available to perform these services. He had learned to draw the line in Muzzafirabad where his first CO, Colonel Gawstone, advised him never to stoop if he could help it. The climate wasn't right for it. Mrs. Gawstone had stooped to pick up a glove and keeled right over and never got up. They had buried her the next day.”
“Long Sight In Age
They say eyes clear with age,
As dew clarifies air
To sharpen evenings,
As if time put an edge
Round the last shape of things
To show them there;
The many-levelled trees,
The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves- all these,
They say, come back to focus
As we grow old.”
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