Ordinary Grace Quotes
"Moonlight pooled on the bedroom floor. Outside the chirr of crickets and other night bugs gave life to the dark."
"During the day most folks battled the heat by closing their curtains against the sun and at night fans drew in the promise of cooler air."
"My father often said that nothing good came of phone calls in the middle of the night."
"Night was the dark of the soul and being up in an hour when the rest of the world was dead with sleep gave me a sinful thrill."
"As we walked to the garage our shadows glided before us, black boats on a silver sea of moonlight."
"The city jail sat on the town square. It was the second oldest building in New Bremen after the First Evangelical Lutheran Church."
"The town wore another face. The town at night was full of delicious possibility."
"But I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all."
"Know what I like about railroad tracks? They're always there but they're always moving."
"The lie once spoken had taken shape as surely as if he’d chiseled it from a block of limestone."
"You’ll be lots of places you’re not supposed to be in your lives. Just don’t get caught."
"Every man handles in a different way the damage war did to him."
"Because you’re her pastor, too. And if she can’t turn to anyone else, she ought to be able to turn to you."
"Words are different from musical notes, it’s a hell of an undertaking."
"Ariel is a young woman and young women fascinate easily, Nathan."
"In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time."
"Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out."
"Sometimes I think that when I came home blind they were ecstatic. It created a situation that bound their two misfits together in a controllable fashion."
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
"God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone."
"He is where God always knew he would be, in a place prepared. And for this we rejoice."
"When you kill a man it doesn’t matter if he’s your enemy and if he’s trying to kill you. That moment of his death will eat at you for the rest of your life."
"The idea of missing out on three services and lounging around the house in my pajamas was enough to make me drool."
"If Jake had come a few minutes later, Mr. Brandt would have been dead."
"Save your regret for the important things, okay?"
"I understood that men and women who indulged in sexual intercourse before marriage were doomed in many ways and I couldn’t imagine Ariel doomed in any way."
"She loves you," I said. "Frankie, you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about."
"She told me love is complicated. It seems easy enough to me. You love each other and you get married and that’s how it works."
"Then call me, Emil. When the darkness comes, call me. I’ll be there for you, I swear it."
"It’s a girl with loose morals," I said trying, I suppose, to frame it in a kind of Victorian way because it sounded not so terrible.
"You look so tired," she replied, then took his hand and kissed it gently and said, "I should get you home."
"Fuck the performance," Ariel said and turned and stormed out the door.
"I don’t know," my mother said. "You don’t know him," Ariel said.
"Work is what he needs to bring him back to happiness," Ariel said.
"I’ve put his life story onto paper," Ariel said. "I know him."
"A wounded man," Ariel replied without hesitation.
"I hear you in her voice, I feel you in her touch."
"I will, Emil," she said. "When we know something."
"Are you the kind of man who fights only boys? Or would you be interested in fighting a man?"
"We don’t know anything," my father said. "They just want to talk to the boy."
"I don’t give a rat’s ass whether you believe me or not. I just want my can."
"The police have it and they’re going to put you in jail until you tell them what you did with Ariel."
"Everything in there I found somewhere or someone gave me. I’m not a thief. And I sure as hell don’t know anything about your sister."
"Rain began to fall in drops so large and heavy they left dents in the sand."
"In the driving rain that afternoon a search was conducted along both sides of the river."
"Loss, once it’s become a certainty, is like a rock you hold in your hand."
"Hope was what my father held to. My mother chose despair."
"I will tell you what’s left, three profound blessings. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us exactly what they are: faith, hope, and love."
"I invite you, my brothers and sisters, to rejoice with me in the divine grace of the Lord and in the beauty of this morning, which he has given us."
"I can’t stop thinking about how much I want her back."
"Normally my mother took Jake to his speech therapy but the Monday after Ariel died she didn’t. That morning, she’d left us."
"If you weren’t around Jake all the time you would have had trouble gauging him."
"Without turning from the window my father had said, 'Right now, Frank, I’d guess everything.'"
"I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I’ve thought about it since and I believe I understand."
"We sat together on the top step and looked out at the yard and the church on the other side of the street and beyond that the grain elevators mute beside the tracks."
"But I also thought about the question I’d posed to Karl Brandt the day Jake and I had ridden in his fast little car: Are you going to marry my sister?"
"I finally said, 'They had a complicated relationship.'"
"Jake hadn’t said much of anything all evening. My grandfather had blustered a good deal when he heard about Ariel’s condition and said if he could just get his hands on Karl Brandt he’d wring that boy’s neck."
"In a small town nothing is private. Word spreads with the incomprehensibility of magic and the speed of plague."
"The whole two miles to the Heights I pumped hard on the pedals as if chased by demons."
"My mother stood up from the piano bench. 'Just one question, Julia: What are you afraid of?'"
"I couldn’t believe how calm my mother seemed, how solid, like cold iron."
"A great quiet was left in their wake, the kind I imagined that might have fallen on a battlefield after the guns had been silenced."
"Don’t you feel it, Nathan? There’s something they’re holding back, something they know and aren’t telling."
"The only thing I feel is great dismay at how the Brandts are being treated by the people of this town."
"Everything’s different. I’m afraid sometimes."
"There are some things you can’t run from, Frank."
"Being dead was a thing and not a horrible thing because it was finished and if you believed in God, then you were probably in a better place."
"I don’t want just anyone carving Ariel’s box."
"I wondered if Doyle was inside, wondering who else Doyle had told."
"I’d hoped for a kind of miracle that day, hoped for something like the joy that had filled me on the Sunday before when my father had stood and delivered his brief, miraculous sermon."
"But as we entered the gate of the cemetery I felt only grief knifing deep into my spirit."
"Somehow I’d imagined it would be as Gus said, a beautiful box carved from the earth."
"To abandon Ariel... that was too much. I began to cry."
"Heavenly Father, for the blessings of this food and these friends and our families, we thank you. In Jesus’s name, amen."
"There’s a math problem everyone is familiar with... Not about how many miles the trains would have covered but about the travelers on them."
"Because I thought of them as traveling on the same set of tracks, I imagined their meeting as a catastrophic collision."
"He walks like a man built of toothpicks, afraid that the connections will not hold."
"I’d lived there five years, the longest I would live anywhere until I married and had my own family and settled down."
"‘Seventy times seven, Frank.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s how we’re supposed to forgive.’"