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”
“I look at people in a different
perspective. I saw you differently. Shy
with a smart-ass mouth. Reserved, but you
know exactly how to cut loose. Girls like you
I have to watch out for. Girls like you are the
deadliest ones.”
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains.”
“You need to fear me, not hate me."
I did. I feared him. But I think I hated him more. No, I knew I hated him more. For what he'd done. For what he was doing. For the betrayal. Most of all, for tarnishing something so beautiful and making it ugly. I trusted him. I gave myself to him, and he took me, peeled back layers of my soul until he saw it all. Then he took me.”
“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
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