Faces in the Water - Pg 202

   I wrote to death; Dear Death, I said, formalizing our relationship, and the leavings of light wastefully spilled were strewn on the lawn and the park.

Faces in the Water - Pg 201

   Sun and shade are tricks and I trust nothing and I understand why we fear the telephone, why, although we have cut the cables, we still lift the receiver and wait for the voice we dread; and I understand mirrors and try to track the point in their depth when we become nothing.

Faces in the Water - Pg 189

   I waited patiently for him to perform a miracle... the face of the world stayed the same, the sick were not healed, the roof did not dissolve and let in the stars.
   Eric taught me to dance.

Faces in the Water - Pg 170

   Their minds were planets in their private sky and their behavior gave little evidence of their real night and day and the pull of their secret tides; their heavenly collisions storms floods droughts and seasons of strength.

Faces in the Water - Pg 159

   When you have been in hospital long enough you tend to lose the urgent need, taken for granted in the "outside world," to express disbelief; it seems pointless, even a presumption, to burst out with cries of "That's not true" when you realize that truth is the indestructible foundation of the foundation of the foundation and needs no defense anyway.

Faces in the Water - Pg 145

   Alice died in the night, in great pain. There was a comfort for us in knowing that the nurse on duty had a reputation for laying out the dead with care. They said she made Alice look beautiful; a touch of cotton wool here and there, her cheeks full and flushed and delicately made-up, her hands clasping fresh flowers. If one had known Alice only in the daytime as the prim hard-working maid of the ward, one would have thought that should she chance to wake and find herself wearing lipstick and rouge she would be shocked. But we had seen her in the night and heard her thrilling extravagant tales, and surely, we thought, no one would have been more pleased to spend the longest night of all transformed, though mildly, as a Jezebel.

Faces in the Water - Pg 139

   She had known many of the patients for years and was loved and trusted by them and her attitude was usually one of happy sarcasm where words which came from her as sarcasm and mockery, a habit which she had perhaps acquired when learning to impress and obey the dictatorial matron of years ago, seemed in the air to undergo a transformation, to be fused with her abundance of vitality and sympathy so that they arrived without seeming to hurt.

Faces in the Water - Pg 138

   She told me once, in a moment of confidence which she always regretted... after her first day on duty, she cried most of the night and resolved, though she never kept her resolution, to submit her resignation and leave the appalling place and become a nurse in a general hospital where the patients were not shamed and abused because of their illness and where you could at least see what was wrong with them and prepare a neat dressing with ointment and clean white bandages to soothe and heal, and with no difficulty keep the patient quietly trapped in bed. But here at Cliffhaven or any mental hospital you had to provide your own bandages from within yourself to bind wounds that could not be seen or measured, and at the same time it seemed you had to forget that the patients were people, for there were so many of them and there was so much to do. The remedy was to shout and hit and herd.

Faces in the Water - Pg 130

   I merely dreamed that a letter would come addressed to me, a love letter, that I would take it to my room and read it again and again and memorize it and pore over the handwriting and try to imitate it and change my own ink to green if the handwriting were in green ink. But who would write me a love letter?

Faces in the Water - Pg 128

   I could not remember people and if I met them in the street and they spoke to me as if they had been friends I learned to talk to them without knowing who they were.
   "Who was that?" I would say afterwards to my sister who accompanied me on these outings. And we would laugh, making fun of my memory, and we would talk together of my "country mansion" and wonder what had caused me to forget so much. In the attempted sharing of childhood reminiscences I experienced not a surge of recollected incidents and delights, but a vast invasion of loneliness. Again I could not remember, but this time, afraid to face the emptiness, I pretended memory and no one guessed.

Faces in the Water - Pg 128

   My books in the bookcase and the shelves around the wall seemed to have absorbed more damp and decay in my absence, as if human contact with them had been an antidote to disintegration; little worms with black eyes had settled on the ends of the pages and begun a marathon meal that they must have thought would never be interrupted, as if the books had told them to devour devour at all costs since whoever had experienced a spiritual hunger for them had long since departed or died.

Faces in the Water - Pg 119

   And meanwhile in fits and starts the brothers caper palely up and down and arouse no laughter, not in the self-absorbed who are mad because they live so close to their own skin and its many-celled domes that are besieged with echoes from the striking moon.

Faces in the Water - Pg 114

   I seldom read my book yet it became more and more dilapidated physically, with pictures falling out and pages unleaving as if an unknown person were devoting time to studying it. This evidence of secret reading gave me a feeling of gratitude. It seemed as if the book understood how things were and agreed to be company for me and to breathe, even without my opening it, an overwhelming dignity of riches; but because, after all, the first passion of books is to be read, it had decided to read itself.

Faces in the Water - Pg 110

   I guessed that Louise was living in a horror story more alarming than any found in science-fiction paperbacks; she had discovered the inescapable subject and object of all horror--man himself.

Faces in the Water - Pg 107

   I belonged now to the raging mass of people and the dead lying, like rests in the music, upon the ground. I knew the mad language which created with words, without using reason, has a new shape of reason; as the blind fashion from touch an effective shape of the sight denied them.

Faces in the Water - Pg 95

   And the days passed packing and piling themselves together like sheets of absorbent material, deadening the sound of our lives, even to ourselves, so that perhaps if a tomorrow ever came it would not hear us; its new days would bury us, in its own name; we would be like people entombed when the rescuers, walking about in the dark waving lanterns and calling to us, eventually give up because no one answers them; sometimes they dig, and find the victims dead. So time was falling upon us, like snow, muffling our cries and our lives, and who would melt it for us?

Faces in the Water - Pg 91

   She spent her day waltzing, with one of the ghosts that are easy to conjure, when one is ill, held lovingly in her arms. And moving in dignity around the room--bestowing now always welcome blessings, turning a prophetic gaze upon the vision of squalor and agitation that surrounded her.

Faces in the Water - Pg 90

   I watched from the special table, as from a seat in a concert hall, the raging mass of people performing their violent orchestration of unreason that seemed like a new kind of music of curse and cry with the undertone of silence flowing from the quiet ones, the curled-up, immovable and nameless; and the movement was a ballet, and the choreographer was Insanity; and the whole room seemed like a microfilm of atoms in prison dress revolving and voyaging, if that were possible, in search of their lost nucleus.

Faces in the Water - Pg 86

   And the people: I knew now that they were automatons geared to a pitch of excitement they could not understand and fearful lest whatever or whoever controlled them should tire of giving them distraction, and let them run down like broken toys and have to find in their own selves a way of overcoming the desolation in which they lived.

Faces in the Water - Pg 67

   Although I could not communicate with her because I was speechless I lay in my bed, staring at her, and trying to warn her of the veneer of peace and pleasantness, the brightness of the bedspreads and the sun-frocked people outside; I tried to say beware the room is laid with traps and hung with hooks.

Faces in the Water - Pg 66

   "I am Mrs. Ogden," she said.
   Her dresses had been marked, her shoes her nighties, and in the rush of admission they had forgotten to mark her, therefore she was telling people her name, indelibly, like the ink on the tape.
   "I am Mrs. Ogden."

Faces in the Water - Pg 61

   When the train stopped in a wilderness of grass and gum trees and was switched to a siding to give clear passage to the southbound express, and stayed there waiting and waiting, until it seemed that it had been abandoned and would be overtaken by the rust and weeds and silence that threaten all men and machines in rest and motion, I was reminded once more of Cliffhaven and the people there. Did their life in a siding give right-of-way to more urgent traffic? And what was its destination?
   But the train moved, and I slept, and did not care.

Faces in the Water - Pg 59

   They are rattling on the locked door, trying to get out, to "see to" things or make sure of something which has intruded from their past and demands their immediate attention; they need to talk to people who are not there, to minister to the long dead--to make cups of tea for tired husbands who are beyond the dayroom and the grave. Voices convey to them urgent messages; they are beside themselves with anxiety; no one will listen to them or understand.

Faces in the Water - Pg 45

   The men's voices, prolonged and powerful if sometimes out of tune, often showed unwillingness to abandon a satisfying last note, keeping the sympathetic organist, a woman from Ward One who was the image of George the Third, playing on with soporific everlastingness until the chaplain, whose appreciation of eternity was dependent on its elusiveness and who felt reluctant to accept its materialization as the A-Men of Shall We Gather at the River or Jesus Shall Reign Where'er the Sun, would determinedly interrupt, raising his voice to pronounce the blessing, "And now may the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ abide with us each one now and forever more."

Faces in the Water - Pg 38

   The prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun--like on of those woolly balls we made at occupational therapy by winding orange wool on a circle of cardboard--rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant patchworks of color with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.

Faces in the Water - Pg 38

   I dreamed of the world because it seemed the accepted thing to do, because I could not bear to face the thought that not all prisoners dream of freedom.

Faces in the Water - Pg 31

   It is said that when a prisoner is condemned to die all clocks in the neighborhood of the death cell are stopped; as if the removal of the clock will cut off the flow of time and maroon the prisoner on a coast of timelessness where the moments, like breakers, rise and surge near but never touch the shore.
   But no death of an oceanographer ever stopped the sea flowing; and a condition of sea is its meeting with the land. And in the death cell time flows in as if all the cuckoo clocks grandfather clocks alarm clocks were striking simultaneously in the ears of the prisoner.

Faces in the Water - Pg 27

   Dr. Howell drank from the special cup which was tied around the handle with red cotton to distinguish the staff cups from those of the patients, and thus prevent the interchange of diseases like boredom loneliness authoritarianism.

Faces in the Water - Pg 24

   I can hear someone moaning and weeping; it is someone who has woken up in the wrong time and place, for I know that the treatment snatches these things from you leaves you alone and blind in a nothingess of being and you try to fumble your way like a newborn animal to the flowing of first comforts; then you wake, small and frightened, and the tears keep falling in a grief that you cannot name.

Faces in the Water - Pg 20

   When I first came to Cliffhaven and walked into the dayroom and saw the people sitting and staring, I thought, as a passerby in the street thinks when he sees someone staring into the sky, If I look up too, I will see it. And I looked but I did not see it. And the staring was not, as it is in the streets, an occasion for crowds who share the spectacle; it was an occasion of loneliness, of vision on a closed, private circuit.

Faces in the Water - Pg 19

   The tracks of time crossed and merged and with the head-on collision of hours a fire broke out blackening the vegetation that sprouts a green memory along the side of the track. I took a thimbleful of water distilled from the sea and tried to extinguish the fire. I waved a small green flag in the face of the oncoming hours and they passed through the scarred countryside to their destination.

Faces in the Water - Pg 19

   Sometimes they approached us and began to confide in us or touch our sleeves, reverently, as if we were indeed what we felt ourselves to be, a race apart from them... And yet when the time of treatment came and they and we were ushered or dragged into the room at the end of the dormitory all of us whether from the disturbed ward or the "good" ward uttered the same kind of stifled choking scream when the electricity was turned on and we dropped into immediate lonely unconsciousness.

Faces in the Water - Pg 18

   In spite of the snapdragons and the dusty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter. And it was always our season of peril: Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.

Faces in the Water - Pg 14

   I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the Giant Unreality.

Faces in the Water - Pg 9

   The streets throng with people who panic, looking to the left and the right, covering the scissors, sucking poison from a wound they cannot find, judging their time from the sun's position in the sky when the sun itself has melted and trickles down the ridges of darkness into the hollows of evaporated seas.

SON - LOIS LOWRY

Son - Pg 292

   Frightened by his own feelings, he had listened mutely to the wails of grief that permeated the community. That day had changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person had found ways to be more worthy of the sacrifice he had made. They had become kinder, more careful, more attentive to one another.

Son - Pg 289

   Kira's father had been blind, and sound had been his life. He knew--and could imitate--each bird's call and song; they came from the trees, unafraid, to eat from his outstretched hands. The entire village had gathered to sing a farewell as he was laid to rest, but the only song that day was theirs; the birds had fallen silent, as if they mourned.

Son - Pg 215

   She glanced at him and saw that he was teasing her. His look was fond. He turned away quickly and tried to hide the fondness, but Claire knew. She had seen him look that way at a half-grown lamb prancing in the meadow on a midsummer afternoon, admiring its agile charm. She had seen him look that way at her, and knew there was a longing to his gaze.

Son - Pg 171

   Claire stood silent, awed by the music, puzzled by the concept of love, and moved by both the solemnity and the celebration of the occasion.

Son - Pg 160

   "Will you go to school soon?" she asked Bethan.
   "What be school?"
   She didn't know how to answer the child. And maybe, she realized, it wasn't important. Six letters; they made a name. What did it matter? She looked again at the word she had written then erased it with her own toes, stamped the sand firm, and tossed the stick into a pile of glistening kelp nearby.

Son - Pg 149

   "Smell," Alys told her, and held it to the girl's nose.
   "Old," Claire said. "Sweet." She leaned back in the chair and sighed. "What is it?"
   "Beach roses from sixty years ago."
   "Why--"
   "To hold memories. Scents do that. When you smelled the tea--"
   "Yes. For a moment something came back," the girl acknowledged. "Like a bit of breeze. It drifted past. I couldn't keep it with me. I wanted--" But she couldn't say what she wanted. She sighed and shook her head. "It went away."
   "It was waiting."

Son - Pg 146

   To herself, she murmured, shaking her head with amusement as her eyes twinkled at her own memory. "Only thirteen. But we was barefoot and flower-strewn and foolish with first love."

Son - Pg 141

   She stood often on the shore with the wind blowing her hair and molding her skirt against her legs. She watched the horizon as if she waited. But she had no knowledge of what she waited for. The sea had drunk her memories away, leaving only her name.

Son - Pg 135

   The village nestled at the foot of a forbidding cliff in the curved elbow of an arm of land. The peninsula jutted out from the main coast in an isolated place where time didn't matter, for nothing changed.

Son - Pg 135

   Now and then one stopped, turned, and looked out toward the sea and the horizon with its darkening sky as if searching for the silhouette of a vessel that might have thrown this astonishing gift their way. But there was nothing there but what had always been there: empty ocean the color of pewter, tarnishing to black now as night fell.

Son - Pg 116

   And so she was the one who felt things. The only one! It was why she yearned for the child, and felt her heart melt each time his little hand waved and he said "Bye-bye" to her, calling out her name in his silvery voice, smiling that amazing smile.
   She would not let them take that from her, that feeling. If someone in authority noticed the error, if they delivered a supply of pills to her, she thought defiantly, she would pretend. She would cheat. But she would never, under any circumstances, stifle the feelings she had discovered. She would die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son.

Son - Pg 107

   Claire choked back tears as she pedaled her bike back to the Hatchery. More and more she despised her life: the dull routine of the job, the mindless conversation with her coworkers, the endless repetition of her days. She wanted only to be with the child, to feel the warm softness of his nexk as he curled against her, to whisper to him and to sense how he listened happily to her voice. It was not right to have these feelings, which were growing stronger as the weeks passed. Not normal. Not permitted. She knew that. But she did not know how to make them go away.

Son - Pg 107

   She turned away, feeling tears well in her eyes. What on earth was the matter with her? No one else seemed to feel this kind of passionate attachment to other humans. Not to a newchild, not to a spouse, or a coworker, or friend. She had not felt it toward her own parents or brother. But now, toward this wobbly, drooling toddler--

Son - Pg 90

   There had been no surprises in her life, or in anyone's within the community. Just the Assignment Ceremony, at Twelve: the disappointing surprise, then, of being named Birthmother. And later, of course, the shock of her failure.
   But now it was again the dull routine of daily life in the community. The rasping voice through the speaker, making announcements, giving reminders. The rituals and rules. The mealtimes, and the work. Always the work.

Son - Pg 58

   For Claire's entire life, her feelings had been those of--what? She searched in her mind for the right descriptive word. Contentment. Yes, she had always been content. Everyone was, in the community. Their needs were tended to; there was nothing they lacked, nothing they... That was it, Claire realized. She had never yearned for anything before. But now, ever since the day of the birth, she felt a yearning constantly, desperately, to fill the emptiness inside her.
   She wanted her child.

Son - Pg 55

   Claire was fascinated. "What did people do with 'pets'?"
   Dimitri shrugged. "Played with them, I think. And also, pets provided company for lonely people. We don't have those now, of course."
   "Nobody's lonely here," Edith agreed.
   Claire was quiet. She didn't say this, but she was thinking: I am. I am lonely. Even as she thought it, though, she realized she didn't really know what the term meant.

Son - Pg 36

   Briefly she wondered about her parents, whether they ever thought of her--or, for that matter, of Peter. They had raised two children successfully, fulfilling the job of Adults with Spouses.

Son - Pg 30

   Even if it might be against the rules, some kind of infringement... there would be no way for anyone to get caught in the act of wondering, Claire thought. It was an invisible thing, like a secret. She herself spent a great deal of time at it... wondering.

WILDALONE - KRASSI ZOURKOVA

Wildalone - Pg 266

   I realized that the cultural gap between me and my friends had just taken on an entirely new dimension. They would continue their normal lives, shocked when someone quit a job in finance to pursue a hobby. Whereas my own life had now veered into off-the-charts crazy. The kind of crazy where I should have looked Ben in the eyes, smiled casually, and said: "I know exactly what you mean. A few years back, my sister announced she was quitting her human life to go tear men to pieces in the Balkan mountains."

Wildalone - Pg 241

   I lay down on the grass. The gravel path had ended and I stayed there, letting the moonlight curve around my body and take its shape--a last blueprint from which to re-create me and bring me back, on some future night like this, if I decided to pay those hills another visit. I would be a different creature then. Untamed. Ethereal. Affected by nothing except the moon.

Wildalone - Pg 220

   Don't bother sitting down at the piano unless you're ready to become a wound, Rhys had warned me. The music, the song, the dance--everything bleeds.

Wildalone - Pg 155

   While we walked, he spoke to me about darkness. About his perpetual darkness and how he wanted to take me, the way a heavy night sweeps the earth: storming it, bursting through each of its crevices and hard, hard as a root from which we would both fall toward each other, madly, irreversibly, without even knowing it--

Wildalone - Pg 126

   It was always Princeton's arches that took the breath away. A world of fuss left behind. Ahead--distant lattice windows, a tree, perhaps a patch of sky. But in between, you felt on the cusp of miracles. The low ceiling would close overhead, ready to keep your secrets. Feeble light would stretch your shadow across the walls. Your steps would turn into music. And for a few seconds, as you made your way down the eerie passageway, there would be only you and the stone. Nothing else.

Wildalone - Pg 98

   Part of me still missed Rhys. Not him exactly--the fantasy of him. Of our few moments by the Greek vases, when he had spoken to me in riddles about love.
   The place turned out to be the opposite of what I remembered: no magic, no ghosts, just an unremarkable room with a few cluttered cabinets.

Wildalone - Pg 65

   The airport in Sofia looked like any other: white marble, steel everything drenched with light through a glass ceiling, as if the entire terminal was designed to give those who stayed behind the illusion of being headed somewhere, into a sky of their own.

Wildalone - Pg 63

   She had been ethereal, a dandelion: the flower of wishes. Of all flowers, this was the only one that began bright and ripe (like the sun), then paled to a weightless silver (like the moon), letting you blow it off into the wind--a constellation of scattered seeds--so that your wish would come true.

Wildalone - Pg 62

   The two of them locked eyes--accomplices for life, trying to outwit grief. Then the vast quiet of their sadness poured out, the dam suddenly released after so many years.

Wildalone - Pg 40

   The birds, lamenting, wept for Orpheus; the beasts gathered in despair one last time for him; the trees, shedding their leaves, mourned him with bared crowns. They say the rivers wept too, swollen with their own tears; and the water nymphs--the naiads--with disheveled hair, put on somber clothes.

Wildalone - Pg 36

   I had wanted to be there alone so I could look for the vase undisturbed, but now wished I had come earlier, with the others. There was too much silence. It rose from the gray carpets and crawled up the walls, leaving its invisible imprint on everything.

Wildalone - Pg 22

   My fingers fell on the keys and disappeared in the music, in its dark anguish. I had to concentrate on the piano and could no longer see him. But every nerve in my body felt his presence, felt watched by him--the only person in the hall still standing--as if he wanted me to notice him. To know he was there. And to play the last nocturne only for him.

Wildalone - Pg 20

   I didn't argue with him back then, but now wished that I had asked him questions--about that elusive age at which one stopped being a child and became worthy of the cosmic ear. Did eighteen cut it? It'd better. Because, with my first concert in America only days away, I dreaded finding out what might happen if the universe decided to listen before you were ready.

Wildalone - Pg 20

   "You are restless, you want answers. But music is not something a child can fully understand," my piano teacher warned me, being the only one to sense that something was wrong. "So don't expect to fall in love with it quite yet. For now just master the technique. Tame the keys, teach instinct to your fingers. One day you'll begin to hear the music. To really hear it. Then the universe, too, will begin to listen."

Wildalone - Pg 16

   Only Chopin managed to bring out the piano's full ability to create extraordinary sound. He considered grandiosity vulgar. Loud playing--offensive. A frail man with a velvet touch, he devoted his life to a single instrument. And the result was phenomenal. Everything I hear now seems so insignificant that I would rather not hear it at all, wrote a well-known pianist after hearing Chopin play live. That was beyond all words. My senses have left me.

Wildalone - Pg 3

   I shall grow old in darkness and in darkness I shall leave this earth, all its treasures still vivid inside my scarred eyelids. But until then, every night, within that same darkness she dances for me--breathtaking as she was back then--and she abandons her beauty to my madly aching heart, the heart which her fingers failed to reach but which she stole, she stole nonetheless...

Wildalone - Pg 2

   I had tasted beauty on my travels--beauty as rare in the darkness of our world as a man without regrets among the dying.

NEVERHOME - LAIRD HUNT

Neverhome - Pg 229

   "Good night," my mother said to me when she had finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that's just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it.

Neverhome - Pg 212

   We almost never talked as we ate. Just let our fingers go out and open jars and cut slices and spread spreads. It was one of these nights, as we were eating hoecakes and honey, that she put her hand on my hand and asked me if I was awake or asleep.
   "I don't know," I said, so she told me to follow her and we went out to the pump where she had me fill a bowl and give it to her. Then she lifted up that bowl and poured it over my head.
   For a minute I was far away. I was back in the heat of Virginia. I was standing at the General's side. He was asking me to be a sharpshooter; I was hiding in a well; whole days went by as I waited to take my shot, and then I was in a tree, swaying with its branches, leaning with its leaves, aiming my gun. "I know you didn't steal out of any of your own comrades' haversacks, I know it, you are my sharpshooter, you are my best soldier," the General said. The bowl came back up off my head before I could answer.
   The General's wife told me then as I dripped out there in the yard in Ohio and not on the fighting fields of Virginia that I could stay at her house for as long as I wanted but that it was time to wake now, that I had slept long enough.

Neverhome - Pg 209

   "You're a nice fellow and you have been kind to me, but it wasn't pretty like the way you're saying it," I said.
   He stopped the wagon when I said this... then flicked his stump up sideways in the air... The knobbly end of it was browner than any other part of him that I could see.
   "They burned that shut with an officer's hand iron," he said. "Fifty years ago and I can still feel it. I mentioned earlier I had been to war. It took them four tries, and they had to heat up the iron again between each time. But that's the gentle part of my tale. I know something other than knights in armor about this war we got now... You say something one way instead of the other often enough and maybe the thing quits crawling into your bed with you and stroking its claws at your cheek."

Neverhome - Pg 153

   That very night in a dream I went rushing over the treetops... I found the house burned to the ground and Bartholomew run off far away. In his place were old and evil men sharpening their plows and planning to set our good oxen to the yoke and, to the tune of "Dixie" made it worse, gobble everything up.
   It was these same men had burned our neighbor out those years before and so my mother came into the dream and stood in the center of the cinder of our house, which had been her house, and wept. The tears of my mother must have found a way out of the dream and onto my face because when I woke there they were. Hot and heavy ghosts come to haunt my face.

Neverhome - Pg139

   I went on thinking about my mother every day just as I had before I had gotten married only now Bartholomew was there and the smells and sounds of the past didn't scorch quite so hard, didn't make me stand and slash at the air with a stick or run out hunting more often than I had to. They were still there though, those smells and sounds and sights, and they chewed and worked at me like worms in their corridors, and then other worms came with their own mouths to chew and keep them company. After a time, like I've told it, I packed up my bag and went to war.

Neverhome - Pg 138

   He had rolled an old whiskey barrel all the way out from town and had set that barrel in the yard and had hollered for me to come out of my house and he hopped up on that barrel and danced like a dervish in a mulberry bush or a monkey had a toothache or a rhinoceros had a headache or some such and then he hopped back down and when he saw I'd started up breathing again he said what I've already told, then said he wanted to marry me.

Neverhome - Pg 125

   Three days later at dusk the woman had walked into their camp with her daughters and three other children in tow. When pressed, she would not say how she had freed the children, only that it wasn't any use to go after the others taken because they were all killed...
   When Neva Thatcher had finished this story she brushed back a brown curl of hair, took a sip of her tea, and told me if I wanted she would give up on her project of going back home to Maine and that I could stay and live with her here. She had a wedge of land out in the countryside I could cultivate if I liked... I did not answer, just sat still and looked at her, couldn't find any word I could say would correspond to the story she had told about the woman who had gone off into the wild to get back what had been taken from her and what she was asking me.

Neverhome - Pg 122

   "Show me how you march," she said.
   "I don't remember how to march," I said.
   She pouted a minute, worked at slicing cheese and snapping crackers. Then she stopped that and came to me, slowly with the first steps, then quickly with the last, then slowly she kissed me. I let her do this for a time. Her mouth tasted like linden berries of all things and I realized I couldn't remember what Bartholomew's mouth tasted like... We stood both of us, Neva and I, with our arms hanging at our sides and only our mouths pressed together.

Neverhome - Pg 115

   I could not run after I had left the schoolhouse-hospital grounds and climbed a fence and gone into the trees... I couldn't run but I thought about Bartholomew running, those years ago, when he had been a boy and I had been a girl. At our wedding three years to the day after he put that flower in my hand we had a basket of zinnias. Every color they come in, though mostly deep, heart-smoking red.
   You can't ever know when the dead world will come to you. Only that it will.

Neverhome - Pg 94

   We had not one of us slept even a snack wink in two days but they had us double-time it. I expect I was not the only one could not hear from the cannon fire, and we ran to that fight in the woods in a silence I would trade the happy half of the world not to make the acquaintance of again.

Neverhome - Pg 75

I had on my mind that church steeple wasn't there and those graves in the forest that weren't graves. They were on my mind but I didn't know how to think about them so I shut my eyes.

Neverhome - Pg 74

   She asked the Akron boy sitting closest to her to tell his tale and when he had gotten about five words into it she stopped him and said, "May I kiss you?"
   He appeared struck. Took a hard swallow. "If you got to," he said.
   So she leaned over and did the job. Right there at the table over cold pork and corn bread.

Neverhome - Pg 70

   "We got to get on," I said.
   "Stay and tell your story," said the grandpa. "Everyone gets a turn."
   "We got miles to walk."
   "Boy, those miles will wait on you. They won't go anywhere."...
   The grandpa had grown a kind of leer to him. He had his crutch up in the air again. There were others starting to look on.
   "Tell us the story about how you are going to kill us all. Kill us and our babies," said the woman holding her little apple-head thing.
   "We don't want to hurt anyone," I said.
   "You won't hurt anyone," the woman said. "You can't hurt anyone. Not here. We're done hurting."

Neverhome - Pg 63

   "My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took."
   I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn't know what a man would say. I knew a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that.

Neverhome - Pg 58

   The lady who liked roses died before my mother was done growing up, and she got sent, her and her books and her picture, to live with an aunt on this farm.
   I don't know what happened to my mother's mother, not do I have much of any idea where that picture is now. What I do know is that when my mother was grown up and had had me and all that was past and she could sit on her own front porch and laugh again her own laugh, she would still dream to waking at night about thorns.

Neverhome - Pg 57

   When I was a child and my mother let me go, I used to run out to the rise with a feather band on my head. I expect I got a friend or two to play at it with me over the years. You can't pick anything up out of the dirt that will take you close to the true past, but the child a-dance at dusk amid the chopped-down cornstalks can conjure it.

Neverhome - Pg 53

   I had had it in mind that morning of my leaving that despite our troubles of the past year he would give me some fine Bartholomew word of parting, then wave at me as he wiped away a tear. Would stand tall and wave. Instead, he had looked one last time at me, wrapped his arms hard around his chest like he was afraid his lungs might leave him, and sat down.
   "You had better get to marching because I can't stand it to see you any longer when you are already gone," he said when I came over...
   "I am here," I whispered, bending close.
   "Off to war with you, Ash Thompson," he said.
   He said, "I will stay behind and guard this life we don't have and this family we don't got."

Neverhome - Pg 50

   There was no place for dresses that night back home. After we had done our climbing and racing, Bartholomew and I shucked off our britches both of us and lay down together at the edge of our yard. There were mosquitoes out in some number but we thrashed and rolled so eagerly that they barely got a chance at us. Bartholomew came up close on his completion and told me he wanted to stay. "Stay close now," he said. But I didn't.

Neverhome - Pg 48

   I do know that my mother had legs made of iron and that they were long, and the times I saw them bare they looked like they were holding themselves still and springy at the bottom of a rushing stream. I saw her legs those Sundays of the month we would take our bath. She would step out of the bath and those legs just kept on coming out of the water like they were tornadoes climbing up out of a pond.
   I saw boys in the war had legs some like hers but you wouldn't have traded hers for theirs.

Neverhome - Pg 11

   I was slow at my writing back then and using my pen to make words that would still mean something after traveling so many miles seemed a strange chore. I would read through my letters before I posted them off and it seemed like I was reading the letters of a stranger to a stranger and I did not like the way this made me feel.

Neverhome - Pg 8

   My mother had traveled in a train once and I told her I wanted to travel like her. Whoosh across the countryside, float the length of its long waters in a boat. I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Walk forward with a thousand others. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run... We both of us, me and Bartholomew, knew what my mother would have said in response and so it was like she was saying it each time I asked her what she thought.
   Go on. Go on and see what you got.

Neverhome - Pg 6

   The boys at my tent had a game of cards going when I got back and I stood awhile and watched it. In between bets they talked about all the rebel-whipping to come. They had pipes in their mouths, and cheeks still fat from their farms. I did not know what was coming any better than they did but it did not feel like a thing to rattle happy at the dark about. Still, when one of them looked up from his poor hand and asked how many rebels I planned on killing, I smiled and put my own pipe in my mouth and said I'd get my hundred. A little later after I had tended to my gun and polished my bayonet I lay under my blanket and thought about that hundred. I thought about my Bartholomew too. I thought about the hundred then I thought about Bartholomew then I fell asleep and dreamed I was floating dead as the ages in the cool waters of the creek.

Neverhome - Pg 5

   They handed me my firearm. It was a Model 1861 muzzle-loading Springfield rifle with flip-up sights and percussion lock, and they said you could use it to kill a man a quarter mile away. That was something to think about. How you could rifle a man down was looking at you and you at him but never see his face. I hadn't figured it that way when I had thought on it back home. I had figured it would be fine big faces firing back and forth at each other, not threads of color off at the horizon. A dance of men and not just their musket balls.