In The Lake Of The Woods Quotes
"They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more."
"Lying still under their blankets, they would take turns thinking up names for the children they wanted."
"In the darkness it did not matter that these things were expensive and impossible."
"They envisioned happiness as a physical place on the earth, a secret country, perhaps, or an exotic foreign capital with bizarre customs and a difficult new language."
"It was a problem of faith. The future seemed intolerable."
"They tried to hide it, though. They would go on talking about the fine old churches of Verona."
"It was all arithmetic. A winner, obviously, until he became a loser."
"There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy's belly and crawl inside and stay there forever."
"In the dark, sometimes, he would see a vanishing village."
"Another brilliant day: ivory clouds pinned to a glossy blue sky."
"Little dream filaments kept unwinding in his head—hissing noises, a flapping sound."
"Memory would be null. They would live in perfect knowledge, all things visible, all things invisible, no wires or strings, just that large dark world where one plus one will always come to zero."
"I meant only that the only means I could evacuate the people would be a hand grenade. And that isn't exactly evacuating somebody."
"In every trick there are two carefully thought out lines—the way it looks and the way it is."
"Like I told you, he used to yell things in his sleep. Bad things."
"This whole game—politics—it's like hustling a woman. Same principle more or less."
"You will never explain your tricks [to an audience], for no matter how clever the means, the explanation disappoints the desire to believe in something beyond natural causes."
"The wilderness seemed desolate beyond reason."
"It wasn't the money that had kept her up all night; rather, it had to do with the possibility of a prodigious jackpot just out of reach."
"The pursuit of miracles, the rapture of happy endings."
"We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation."
"Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in one as in the other."
"I'm going to the sky! What? You're going to the sky? Yes, don't stop me."
"I didn't shoot nobody. I shot some cows."
"The choices funnel down and you go where the funnel goes."
"He didn't sound so good. Rambling Rose, that's what Vinny called him."
"I'm an optimist. Life after death, I believe in it."
"I mean, honestly, some things you best walk away from, just shrug and say, Who knows?"
"That big Chris-Craft, it could go forever, all the way to Kenora and then some."
"If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in."
"A person has to hope for something. So I hope they're happy. They deserved a little happiness." —Eleanor K. Wade
"If all is supposition, if ending is air, then why not happiness? Are we so cynical, so sophisticated as to write off even the chance of happy endings?"
"Does happiness strain credibility? Is there something in the human spirit that distrusts its own appetites, its own yearning for healing and contentment?"
"Can we not believe that two adults, in love, might resolve to make their own miracle?"
"If we could just fall asleep and wake up happy," she might've said, and Sorcerer might've laughed and said, "Why not?"
"But who will ever know? It's all hypothesis, beginning to end."
"Too sentimental? Would we prefer a wee-hour boiling? A teakettle and scalded flesh? Maybe so."
"Yet the evidence does not exclude the possibility that they ran for their lives."
"Sorrow, it seems to me, may be the true absolute."
"Can we believe that he was not a monster but a man? That he was innocent of everything except his life?"
"The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma."
"Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does."
"Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved."