Breece D'J Pancake · 192 pages
Rating: (4K votes)
“I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.”
“I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I have only the bottoms and stone animals I collect. I blink and breathe. My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge. --from Trilobites”
“But if life has any definition at all, it is the things that happen to us while we are making plans.”
“I walk along the avenue thinking how shit always sinks, and how all these towns dump their shit for the river to push it down to the delta. Then I think about that girl sitting in the alley, sitting in her own slough, and I shake my head. I have not gotten that low.
I stop in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can't run away from it or drink their way out or die to get rid of it. It's always there, you just look at somebody and they give you a look like the Wrath of God.”
“Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on. --from The Honored Dead”
“I stop in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting people, and think about all the places they are going. But I know they can’t run away from it or drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it. It’s always there, you just look at somebody and they give you a look like the Wrath of God.”
“He hears false power in the preacher's voice, sees outsiders pretending. Old fool, he thinks, new fools are here to take your place.”
“Philip understood that there were people in the world like Eliot for whom love and sex came easy, without active solicitation, like a strong wind to which they had only to turn their faces and it would blow over them. He also understood that he was not one of those people. Instead, he seemed always to be eking out signals, interpreting glances, trying to extract some knowledge of another person's feelings from the most trivial conversations. Nothing came easy for him, and more often than not, nothing came of any of his efforts.”
“We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.”
“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”
“Pijesak, kamenje, vjetar, još narančastije nebo, gomila plosnatih oblaka prema kojima je padalo sunce...
Potom duge sjene, umiranje vjetra, mir...
Samo zvuk kopita na kamenju i zvuci našeg disanja... Prigušeno svjetlo kad se sunce sudarilo s oblacima... Zidovi dana potresani grmljavinom...
Neprirodno jasni obrisi udaljenih predmeta... Hladan, električno plavi osjećaj u zraku...
Opet grmljavina...
Sad - uzbiban, staklasti zastor kiše koja mi se približava zdesna... Plave pukotine u oblacima... Temperatura pada, naš korak i dalje stalan, svijet sad posve jednobojan...”
“The first and oldest of these traditions is tribe-like politics. I use the term “tribe-like” to refer to a pre-modern form of political interaction characterized by a harsh, survivalist quality and an adherence to certain intense primordial or kin-group forms of allegiance. Sometimes the tribe-like group that is in power in the Middle East, or is seeking power, is an actual tribe, sometimes it is a clan, members of a religious sect, a village group, a regional group; sometimes it is friends from a certain neighborhood, an army unit, and sometimes it is a combination of these groups. What all these associations have in common is the fact that their members are all bound together by a tribe-like spirit of solidarity, a total obligation to one another, and a mutual loyalty that takes precedence over allegiances to the wider national community or nation-state. The”
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