Back Roads Quotes
"I keep telling the deputies this, and they keep picking up their Styrofoam cups of coffee and walking away."
"She said she loved the calm of decay and desertion that reigned there."
"Rage starts building inside me, nicely and neatly, like a perfect pyramid of sticks being piled up for a fire."
"Soon I will be nothing but a black skeleton of ash."
"We’re not going to get anything RELEVANT or COHERENT out of him tonight."
"I realized too late we hadn’t figured out a way to make it do this."
"I never felt safer than those days Amber and I spent hiding beneath a blanket-covered card table."
"The deer had thinned out the past couple years."
"Every morning on my way to work, I drove past a yawning group of bare-legged ones in shorts and miniskirts waiting for the school bus."
"It was easier to think of them as always being old instead of being young and dying very slowly."
"Mom read the Bible a lot, but she never went to church. She said she didn’t like Christians."
"I couldn’t have figured it out when I was happy."
"Worry is the interest you pay on trouble before it’s due."
"Maps only work if the place you are trying to get to exists."
"I never got to see him again. It was a closed casket funeral."
"The girls were always preoccupied with keeping themselves wrinkle-free."
"Prison was a reflection of real life, and it had always seemed to me that once a woman had a kid nothing else mattered about her."
"I could picture them laughing and gossiping. Talking about clothes and hairstyles and Beanie Babies."
"I always felt like that’s why God wanted rid of them. Not because they broke a rule. Because they turned on each other."
"I thought the best thing about having a little brother would have been the luxury of occasionally forgetting he existed."
"People were always making excuses for stupidity and a lack of basic decency."
"I couldn’t figure out how she recognized it. If she had ever been over to our house, it was while I was at work."
"Sometimes I wished Mom would get that lethal injection. She’d make a better ghost than a spectator."
"I sensed Jody standing behind me. 'You’re not supposed to burn it,' she said."
"Being the breadwinner took the joy out of a lot of things."
"She seemed okay with it. One time we barricaded him in a closet for a whole day trying to suffocate him."
"There was something evil about feeling that way. Something too arrogant. Even for humans."
"The only answer I could come up with was after the baby died, the parents took the name back because they didn’t want to waste it."
"Even my dad being lowered into the ground didn’t seem as big a betrayal as that."
"But you can’t be both because people can’t feel both."
"Awkwardness kept them away today, and it’s going to keep them away tomorrow."
"I couldn’t figure out what parts I was touching and I didn’t care."
"I thought I might find an alien world without trees and grass."
"Why go to school if the whole planet could be destroyed tomorrow? Why get a job? Why take shit from your parents? Why take shit from anybody?"
"The urge ripped through me again. I imagined slapping her would feel like coming."
"I squeezed her arms until I saw her skin between my fingers turn white."
"Every meal could be my last and I didn’t want it to be hot dogs and mac and cheese."
"I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and hoped his dad had hit him."
"It makes the simplest acts more important and the monumental ones pointless."
"She was the answer. If every man had her, there would be no wars, no crime, no contact sports."
"I wasn’t in any condition to try and figure out what I should have told her."
"I realized I was getting sick of that one. I knew it was the same way she looked at Zack and Esme."
"I thought about her all the time. Most of it was about fucking her, but some of it was about how she made me feel."
"You should be locked up for letting her look like that."
"You are not a bad person. You're not a freak or a pervert. There's nothing wrong with you or Amber. You were children reacting to debilitating emotional and physical abuse the only way you knew how. By turning to each other for comfort and pleasure."
"It wasn't about the rest of the family. It was just about him and her. She talked like I was the other woman."
"The strength to face atrocity didn't come from bravery but from reaching a certain level of numbness."
"I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harley. You are not a bad person."
"I hoped so. I hoped and prayed that it was so. It was her one lousy shot at ecstasy before she became the eternal Virgin, and I hoped she got there."
"She was a woman. He was God. He could have blinked and made a son, but He had gone to her instead."
"Thinking about Misty was worse. She always disappeared into black and when her face started materializing again, I freaked out."
"They shrugged off their humanness like the shedding of a skin and became something new and raw and beautiful in their own ugly eyes."
"The light from the useless moon was enough to give a faint glimmer to the rocks around the train tracks."
"I wasn’t there when Mom shot Dad. I had never seen a dead person except for my grandparents who didn’t count because they were old and unlovable."
"Time is very important to these guys. They begin all their reports with the TIME."
"She was my best intentions mixed with the reality of who I was."
"You have to get Jody a fortune cookie and a paper umbrella every month."
"The food could be better and so could the company, but I’m not very hungry or social these days so it doesn’t matter much."
"Choosing to sleep with me may have ultimately, unwittingly led to the circumstances that ended her life, but I did not pull the trigger."
"The TRUTH is I’ve already wasted so much of my life lying to myself."