Purgatory Ridge Quotes
"A man could change, and watching his son crawl back into his dreaming, Cork vowed—as he did almost every morning—to work at being a better man."
"You will share the same fire. You will hang your garments together. You will help one another. You will walk the same trail. You will look after one another. Be kind to one another. Be kind to your children."
"In the tense quiet, some of the environmentalists had issued statements indicating that a ruling in favor of the logging interests would not deter them from doing what had to be done to preserve Our Grandfathers."
"History, in Cork’s opinion, was a useless discipline... Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter."
"Sometimes the people you loved were the ones you most betrayed with your weakness, something LePere understood well."
"In a place like Aurora, where a man could spend his whole life, cradle to grave, his history was all around him, slapping against him like old newspapers in a wind."
"The conflict between red and white was old and deep."
"The truth is, this morning I’m very glad I’m not in Wally Schanno’s shoes."
"It was like breathing in the air of another time in his life."
"We’re still warriors in the sacred fight to protect Grandmother Earth, but we fight as modern Shinnobs with the weapons Kitchimanidoo has given us—our brains, our determination, and our friendship with those who understand and use the law on our behalf."
"The law often failed those who needed it most. In the history of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe people, the law had more often been their enemy than it had been their friend."
"The water here is so cold, bodies don’t decompose. They just lie there on the bottom of that big lake."
"Lake Superior, son, doesn’t give up its dead."
"Every great plan has some element of craziness to it. That’s what makes it great."
"You used to be sure we'd get a million bucks diving the wreck."
"Can't hold a job or maintain a relationship. Am I right?"
"What if it was murder, Chief? Cold-blooded, well-planned murder."
"We fight for the world our children will inherit, Mr. O'Connor."
"Don't eat the ice, Johnny. It will lower your body temperature. It will kill you."
"Everyone was encouraging. Everyone was amazed. You’re alive, they all told him brightly. You’re alive."
"Shit. He’d have screamed it but for the mouthpiece feeding him air."
"Not yet, he told himself at six minutes when it had already felt like hours."
"What filled that hollow inside him now was a raging sensibility that felt more beast than human."
"The only thing that made sense was that someone had been there before him."
"His Ikelite illuminated a river of coal that spilled from the open cargo hold, but nowhere on that river did he see the camera."
"The compressor lay in pieces. His diving gear and the equipment and supplies for the Anne Marie had all been damaged or destroyed."
"You’ve seen that she walks with a cane. The result of injuries sustained when a pipe bomb went off in her car a couple of years ago."
"‘Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John?’ she began slowly."
"I think you’ll both do fine. Why don’t you come on in?"
"What do you want to play?" Scott asked politely.
"Can I get you something to drink? I made sun tea this afternoon."
"At the very heart of him, he’s still a Lindstrom."
"This way." The gunman motioned them to follow.
"I don’t want you to handle the divorce, Jo. Just tell me what I’m facing."
"I needed, that night, to be what Aurora, Minnesota, believed him to be. A drunken Indian."
"The only people out this way are me and that big log home over there."
"Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John, Brother John?"
"Never underestimate the likelihood everything’s going to go to hell, and be ready for it."
"We’ll get through this," Cork said. "We’ll get them back, I promise."
"Everything had purpose, that the Great Spirit oversaw all life with a profound wisdom."
"The dream turned her thinking to the house on Gooseberry Lane. It was the only place she’d ever lived that she let herself love."
"They didn’t stop for miles, until they came to a place where the logging road opened onto well-graded dirt and gravel."
"Nobody wanted to go to bed. Separating, going to their own rooms, lying alone with their fears seemed impossible."
"It’s not too late, Karl. We’re going to get them back."
"I watched you a long time on the cove. You’re different from the person I thought I saw."
"We weren’t free, but we weren’t dead either, and we’d come close to that."
"Sometimes in a meadow, I will see a killdeer flutter across the ground very near me, pretending her wing is broken."
"You move on with your life, Mr. LePere, but you never forget, do you?"
"Just when you think you’ve got someone pegged."
"The only way for two people to keep a secret is if one of them is dead."
"If you tell someone the grass is full of snakes, even a crooked stick looks dangerous."
"You never did. And that’s been the beauty all along."
"It's when you're almost home that you relax your guard and make mistakes."
"Feels worse than it is. The waves are only three or four feet. Nothing, really. Relax and enjoy the ride."