The Wolf Gift Quotes
"There comes a time when a house owns you and you know you have to get free of it, and go on with the rest of your life."
"It breaks my heart," Reuben said. "This is irreplaceable, Marchent. But I’ll write the best story I can on the place."
"Thoughts," he said, tapping his temple. "I’m writing the piece in my head."
"I’d give the house a name if I bought it," said Reuben, "you know, something that captured the essence of it. Nideck Point."
"My father told me last week that a man of my age has absolutely nothing to say."
"Actually, I haven’t accomplished one single thing in my life yet," he said with an ease that shocked him.
"You’re distractingly handsome, you know, why you’re just about the most adorable boy I’ve ever seen in my entire life."
"The real thing," he’d said under his breath the moment he’d seen it. "Look at those slate roofs, and those must be copper gutters."
"Ah yes, the fresh young mind and memory, nothing like it," she said.
"Does it have ghosts, Marchent?" he asked, following her gaze to the windows. "It doesn’t need them," she declared. "The recent history is grim enough."
"I think you’re uncommonly sensitive, Reuben, to appreciate this rather cold and grim corner of the earth."
"It’s as if they’re always saying, ‘We were here before your kind ever visited these shores, and we will be here when you and your houses are no more.’"
"I’ll show you everything," she said. "It’s a pleasure. Quite a surprising pleasure actually."
"You should have a house like this, you know," she said. A shadow darkened her face, but only for a second.
"That’s so true. How my uncle Felix loved them," she said. "They’re protected, you know, those trees. They can’t be logged."
"My mother’s a brilliant surgeon; my big brother’s a priest."
"We don’t know why people go that route," Reuben said. "Willie was brilliant, but he was an addict."
"I can’t remember scientific information," he said. "I can quote you Dickens and Shakespeare and Chaucer and Stendhal, but I can’t retain anything about string theory or DNA or black holes in space."
"I hope so," he said. And there’s that smile. Why do you hide that smile?"
"I’m dying," he whispered. "They’re dead, all of them. Marchent’s dead. And I’m dying here, and I have to get help."
"What are you saying, he raped her and then she went downstairs and made out a handwritten will leaving him a five-million-dollar piece of property?"
"Someday she’ll make legal history, he thought."
"You think I don’t understand? Romantic coast, romantic house, romantic older woman. Forget about it."
"And then there were all these other smells that had to do with the hospital and its chemicals."
"Mommy, there are no machines," said the daughter. The daughter cried.
"The woods surrounding Marchent’s house, my house, and he thought, We’ll never walk there together."
"He had become the guardian of those particular trees."
"The traffic had thickened, and there were more people on the streets. An atmosphere of gaiety surrounded him."
"You are alone when something like this happens. Doesn’t matter how many people love you and want to help you. You are alone."
"I would give anything in this world to make you better," said Jim, "to have you again look like my brother, Reuben."
"It seemed the tumbling rain carried with it a silvery light in its busy descent."
"He felt quietly powerful, resilient, and self-confident in a way he’d never felt before."
"'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free."
"This was a little house of the woods made by someone who had loved the woods and wanted to be in it without disturbing it."
"Her heated desire had been like melting wax."
"With complete abandon, she’d received him, moaning as spontaneously as he had moaned."
"There was something about her fearlessness that was beyond trusting."
"He’d lain there thinking, reflecting, calling man and beast to account, yet feeling a kind of muted bliss."
"Who else would live in such an unguarded place except a woman for whom the forest was the world, he figured."
"He felt powerfully drawn to her, bound to her by the secret of this, that she’d welcomed him into her bed as he was."
"Good-bye then for a little while, beautiful one."
""I wish I had a name," he answered. "I’d gladly give it to you.""
""Because He made you. Whatever you are, He made you. And He knows why and for what purpose.""
""Some mysteries are simply irresistible," she said. "They have components that alter a life.""
"Our art is built upon the irrepressible stream of images rising from a secret fulcrum that can never be trusted."
"You listen. Don’t commit. Let him download, as the kids say today. Just listen."
"I think he’s putting on the charm with Arthur Hammermill."
"Oh, and by the way, that piece of yours on the Man Wolf that ran this morning in the Observer? That was quite good."
"Laura was sitting on the rug in front of the fire."
"These are the names of the distinguished gentlemen."
"How many times do you think they’ve been forced to change their names?"
"Let me thank you. I’m well aware that you had no obligation whatsoever to see me."
"I see now the writer of the articles you’ve published in the Observer. Poetic, substantive, I would say."
"Yes, my father collected many ancient cuneiform tablets during his years in the Middle East."
"Evil is inevitable in the course of a creation which develops within time."
"Sometimes it’s better not to know the whole story."
"I imagined Felix Nideck to be a fount of knowledge, maybe secret knowledge."
"I’ve been overwhelmed. I’m glad to see you’re more sanguine on the matter."
"If this guy is wearing a costume, it’s a primo number."
"He’s isolated like the Phantom of the Opera, like the Elephant Man."
"I got bitten! I’m going to turn into a werewolf."
"He’s not a human being to them. He’s an animal."
"And this guy has feelings! I mean intense feelings."
"I want to remain here tonight. I want to stay indoors. I don't want the change to come."
"I’ve lost track completely of how many people I’ve killed."
"Feel better? He’d eaten the largest plate of salad he’d ever been served in his life."
"You see, this is a signed order entrusting you to our care."
"I thought I wouldn’t change back. I thought I would be that way forever."
"He’s not so manic now. But the moodiness has begun."
"It’s like a ghost. You see it yourself, you believe it. But nobody else will believe it."
"All morality is of necessity shaped by context."
"Try not to think about all the unanswered questions, Mom. You taught me once that we have to live with unanswered questions all our lives."
"A surgeon can be as superstitious as anybody else."
"No publishing of private photos on Facebook and I mean it!"
"Son, don’t push it. I might show up here and never leave."
"We couldn’t tell you what we were doing. We had to draw them out."
"We always come back to that—that both the brutal world and the spiritual world are sources of truth."
"All creatures born in this world want immortality."
"The greatest difficulties we face in day-to-day survival have to do with the advances in science."
"In time these boys should come to know what we know about them, don’t you think?"
"The worst threat to you is from human beings."
"Evil is a matter of context. That is unavoidable."
"We argue over the words we use, not much else."
"Names become a problem for people who don’t die."
"Why had it been so easy for so many to embrace a creature so uncompromisingly cruel?"
"I love you with all my heart, Laura. I love you with all my soul."
"I want to be alive with every fiber of my being, don’t you see, and for you and me, this is being alive."