The Fisherman Quotes
"A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you cross out of a bad time, believe you me."
"Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow."
"Do you suppose a story can carry away such badness?"
"For a long time after that first day at the river, especially once fishing season was over that fall, there were more than enough nights I rode to sleep on a wave of Scotch."
"Fishing was no miracle cure but, on balance, I guess it did save my life."
"Loss is like a ladder you don’t know you’re standing at the top of and that reaches down, way down past the loss of your job, your possessions, your home."
"I guess they wouldn’t be such a big deal if they didn’t mark us so deeply."
"But when I was fishing, I usually didn’t drink as much at night, since, after having stopped at Pete’s, it was already pretty late and I was already pretty tired by the time I pulled in the driveway."
"Everything’ll have to be in its proper place. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a poorly put-together story."
"A bad day of fishing is still better than a good day of just about anything else."
"The picture fascinated me; I guess because it was so close to showing you what it was, so close to revealing its meaning."
"The kind of rain that was crackling on the diner’s roof, the hard, driving kind that soaks you through in under a minute and then keeps on going, that is not my idea of fun."
"He understands what it is to lose—what it is to lose. He listens. He understands."
"A river of lightning was pouring through him."
"It’s the voice you’d give a lizard, or an eel."
"Her voice was something awful. It's hard, raspy, as if it hasn’t been used in a while."
"The look of a man striding across a frozen river who realizes with sudden horror that the ice he has been traversing has become too thin to support his weight."
"The kind of man who knows that he’s committed a terrible act but is trying with all his might to convince himself that that isn’t the case."
"Like a devil burning in hell, is how Regina will describe it."
"More water pours from that man than you would think one body could hold."
"This isn’t exactly the revelation of the year."
"What’s next? A witch in a gingerbread house?"
"It is nothing," Rainer says, which the three of them know is a lie but which neither Jacob nor Angelo disputes.
"The dark ocean," Rainer says. "Here, it is leaking through."
"It means our friend is further along than I had hoped," Rainer says.
"The water went as far as it could go," Rainer explains.
"You remember from before. If you hear someone, do not listen to them. If you see someone, do not look at them."
"I knew that, if the flower we had been sent for was not transported in the appropriate manner—wound about three times with a piece of cloth torn from the foot of a shroud—then the consequences for whoever was carrying it would be dire."
"And let the blade that is to fall, fall on you. Which it did. But I was cut by it, as well, which I suppose was just."
"He curses me. He damns me as a coward and a fraud."
"The sensation of unreality will assail Lottie more often."
"If only she could find her way back to the blank space that borders dreaming."
"It’s as if you’re seeing how time works, or some such."
"The sensation of having started something whose outcome you can’t be one-hundred-percent sure of."
"I could hear a couple of birds in the branches somewhere nearby, chirping these snippets of song that cut through all the water."
"Most everyone, I suppose, has felt the gaze of someone whose burden of experience renders their regard a tangible thing."
"It was threaded with currents of emotion so powerful they were visible."
"The greater portion of him, I understood, was out of view, a giant with the marble skin and blank eyes of a classical sculpture."
"What the fuck, Abe? What the fuck? You’re going to leave? You’re going to abandon me?"
"Through some miracle, my head escaped colliding with a stone."
"I don’t want to do this. It’s—if he has your strength, then he won’t have to take them away from me."
"That the man I counted my closest friend was about to inflict grievous harm on me, if not kill me outright, was the most monstrous thing I had encountered yet."
"I wasn’t sure what he meant. My heart was pounding, hammering against my chest as if I’d finished a short, fast race."
"An expression of unutterable sadness dragged Dan’s features down."
"You did this to me. What I am is the work of your hand."