Donald Ray Pollock · 261 pages
Rating: (12.1K votes)
“Some people were born just so they could be buried.”
“Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.”
“It's hard to live a good life...It seems like the Devil don't ever let up.”
“He imagined the door to a sad, empty room closing with a faint click, never to be opened again, and that calmed him a little.”
“They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many.”
“Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money.”
“Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always”
“What a perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm there, and the feeding was automatic.”
“He would let himself in whenever he felt like it, come and go as he pleased. I remembered when this was such a big deal for me, not so long ago. I’d wanted my own space, my front door that I could lock behind me and know for sure that nobody was going to be inside there without me. I remembered telling him that I wanted that space back. I remembered asking him for the key, and him walking away from me. I remembered him simply walking away and leaving, without so much as an argument.”
“I know this is our honeymoon. But just sometimes, I wish Luke was a girl.”
“Explaining one's recent loss as more of a continuous journey rather than a dead end, giving one of the invaluable opportunity to gain strength and learn about oneself, and thereby turning this terribly tragic affair into something hugely positive.”
“He was an imperialistic, self-righteous pain in the ass. But he was my pain in the ass, you know? And tonight, I won’t be with him. That definitely feels strange.”
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