Novellas Quotes

“Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.”

“I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.”

“Osby wasn't considered the smartest man in Eads County. But the no one . . . knew him well enough to realize that he wasn't all that far from it either.”

“Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.”

“I couldn't reach him from here even if I tried.”

“And now I can’t breathe for wanting you. I woke up, and your eyes were on fire. You haven’t looked at me like that in years. All need. All want.”

“Since that time, I've had many similar moments, and I can never hear the words "family" and "home" without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them and let them go. When I stop to examine them, though, the words seem hollow, seem to rattle at my feet like empty cans.”

“Even in good families a bad apple can begin an avalanche of troubles,' Dutch said as he sat back in his well-seasoned armchair, lighting his curved rustic pipe. From Book I, In Blood There is No Honor”

“The "Hazeldean heart" was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.”

“I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.”