Prodigal Summer Quotes
"Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed."
"Her body was free to follow its own rules: a long-legged gait too fast for companionship, unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch broken foliage."
"She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words."
"Her heart emptied of words, for once, and filled with a new species of feeling."
"When human conversation stopped, the world was anything but quiet."
"A bird never doubts its place at the center of the universe."
"This morning, he had wanted her to. They had used all the worst words they knew."
"The dawn chorus was a whistling roar by now, the sound of a thousand males calling out love to a thousand silent females ready to choose and make the world new."
"In the high season of courtship and mating, this music was like the earth itself opening its mouth to sing."
"She’d finished brushing out her hair. It cascaded down her back and shoulders and folded onto the porch floor where she sat, rippling all around her like a dark, tea-colored waterfall glittering with silver reflections."
"Deanna actually didn’t know. She’d managed to live her life apart from this and most other mysteries owned by women."
"She’d never quite had a real haircut. Her dad had known better than to take a girl child to his barber, and if he’d meant to think of some other option, he didn’t get around to it before her wild mane grew down to the backs of her knees."
"She stretched her legs straight in front of her while she re-braided her hair into its familiar rope, an exercise her hands could do without mirror or attention."
"She cursed aloud and sat up. Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road—so hard to shake off. So easy to get back."
"No man had ever spoken to her so freely of her body, or compared it to such strange and natural things."
"He called her hair a miracle. He’d said it was like rolling himself up in a silkworm’s cocoon."
"The kind without a man. Eddie Bondo was gone, and that had to be for the best."
"Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream."
"She’d known no other but this one. She asked him what birds were there, and he seemed to know but couldn’t name any except the game birds people shot for food."
"I sleep outside a lot," she said. "I’m on the same schedule as the moon."
"He’d called her hair a miracle. He’d said it was like rolling himself up in a silkworm’s cocoon."
"If you can’t get them suckers all into somebody’s grocery cart in five days or less, then you’ve got you some expensive hog food."
"Tobacco’s value, largely, lay in the fact that it kept forever and traveled well."
"But when nobody’s here, sometimes I have to lie down on the floor and just try to keep breathing."
"My father is a man who’s lost everything: his family’s land, his own father, his faith, and now his wife’s companionship."
"I can’t picture later. Spending my nothing of a life in this kitchen cooking for nobody."
"I praised the Lord for my job at Kroger’s and beg Him to strike Shel dead if that check should fail to keep coming for the kids."
"Don’t you dare tell your sisters I thought about leaving Cole. They’d chop me up and hide the pieces in canning jars."
"You’re not supposed to touch alcohol or cigarettes, and women cover themselves up totally, all but their eyes."
"I may look like I’m doing all right, but I don’t know if I’m coming or going."
"I’m twenty-eight. I’ve never been a widow before. How does a widow act?"
"I’m just glad you told me so I won’t keep using the wrong pronoun. I can’t believe I’ve known that child a year and nobody ever set me straight."
"I was always more of a complainer, but I’m learning to be quiet. It seems like the only grownup way to face this brutal thing that’s happened."
"My roof’s a-caving in, my land’s too steep to plow, and my bottom’s got too much sugar."
"Every creature alive believes this: The center of everything is me."
"Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads."
"The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on."
"There's life in them, too, and that even weeds and pond algae are sacred because they're salamander food."
"God loves them as much as he loves you or me, but I've got new baby ducklings on my pond, and an evil old turtle in there is gobbling them down like the troll under the bridge."
"Mr. Walker, I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s."
"Dear Miss Rawley, I am weary of your grabbing every opportunity as a pulpit for your absurd views on modern agriculture!!"
"Furthermore, what is this business about God being three billion years old? God is ageless."
"I am a scholar of Creation Science, and suggest you think about a thing or two."
"I shall be a good neighbor and send you these thoughts which should be enough for you and your bra-burning Unitarian friends to ponder, I dare say, for many days to come."
"You’re getting sick," he told her when she opened her eyes again.
"Living with no plans at all. I keep bumping into walls."
"You’re just a regular death angel, Mr. Walker."
"The life of a top carnivore is the most expensive item in the pyramid."
"There’s no such thing as alone in this world."
"Every cup of coffee equaled one dead songbird in the jungle somewhere."
"I know a little bit too much about animals to try to deny what I am."
"It’s a sin to kill a spider but not a turkey."
"Even if you never touch meat, you’re costing something its blood."
"Predation’s a sacrament, it culls out the sick and the old, keeps populations from going through their own roofs."
"Living takes life. But not the babies, she cried in her mind. Not these; they were mine."
"What was this uncontrollable sorrow that kept surging through her body like hot water?"
"This was what she had. The beauty of this awful night."
"He could see now exactly what it was: the cabin’s summerlong resident guardian angel who kept down the mice, the devil who took the phoebes, the author of that slow sandpaper sound in the roof—her blacksnake."
"The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction."
"She had climbed up onto a lichen-crusted boulder fifty feet above the spot where the trail ended at the overlook. From here she could look down on everything, the valley of her childhood and the mountains beyond it."
"This was the day, would always be the day, when she first knew."
"Her body’s joy was colored darker now from knowing that each conversation, every kiss, every comforting adventure of skin on skin might be the last one."
"There’s nothing so important as having variety. That’s how life can still go on when the world changes."
"What we’ve got here is just a lot of cow pastures and a creek."
"A long, long process of coming undone from one’s self."
"You have eyes. I can see it’s enough work to break a donkey’s back."
"She was going to be a woman men talked about."
"Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen."
"She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace."
"Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind."
"It was the strangest conviction she’d ever known, and still she felt sure of it."
"To stop a thing like that would require a burning bush, a fighting of fire with fire."
"It was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended."
"She had no use for superstition, had walked unlucky roads until she’d just as soon walk under any ladder as go around it, and considered herself unexceptional."
"She tried to look at the vinyl-sided ranch house in some born-again way. Whatever had gained purchase on her vision up there felt violent, like a flood, strong enough to buckle the dark roof and square white corners of home and safety."