LEGEND OF A SUICIDE - DAVID VANN

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 176

 It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. But what makes me sad, I guess, and the reason I bring all of this up, is that you won't be getting any other lives.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 237

   Perhaps we never were generous enough to the father. A father, after all, is a lot for a thing to be. That sounds bitter, I suppose, but I don't mean it to be bitter; there were times when the father showed me most clearly what I would become, and that, certainly, is a kind of gift, if not always a blessing.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 234

   "What else should I know about you? I know very little, you know."
   "Well, son, let me tell you everything."
   The father never told me anything, of course, but looking back, I can see that I felt closest to the father on that very afternoon. Perhaps it was only gestures--the way the father hitched up his jeans, his sideways grin at the spiel of a salesman, the gratitude and love I thought I saw in certain small movements of the eyes--but even if these indices were only imagined, they did seem to provide what I had wanted for a very long time.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 226

 Perhaps he had been, to some degree, lonely. This was not the kind of thinking I wanted to take very far. My pity for my father up to this point had been limited to a man who had inflicted avoidable pain on everyone around him but who must have suffered some himself. I didn't care to enlarge on this.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 218

   Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 218

   Everything my father had left me vanished. I glanced at the remains and they shifted the light until opacity became translucence and I could see only a diffusion of the unparticular ground beyond, the clutter that promised but gave nothing.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 205

  He saw himself in Mexico and maybe someday in the South Pacific, down there in all the nice weather with warm, beautiful blue water and the green mountains, and he saw that he would still be alone. Roy would never catch up to him. And he wondered what Roy's grave looked like. He realized he'd never get to see it now.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 201

   The next day came slowly. A thin line of gray, or perhaps a blue less dark, and then the peaks outlined as if by their own emanation, and then a faster lightening above them until their edges curled in fire and suddenly everywhere was white and the orange sun ticked upward in thin, segmented lines between two peaks to grow heavy and yellow and merge into the world too hot to look at. All became blind. The water and mountains and air all the same brightness, glaring.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 200

 Boating in a strange place at night you could believe almost anything, he knew, any direction, any depth, so sure of innate fears you could distrust your compass and depth finder right up until you hit the rocks.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 191

   I could have stayed here, he said. If I had not cheated and broken everything up. If I had been able to stand my wife. If salmon had flown like birds through the streets.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 177

   And then Jim went through a time when he didn't seem to have any thoughts or memories at all. He stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling. When he went out, he stared at the trees or at the waves. The water was calm, no whitecaps. A surge more than waves at times, the water gray and opaque and thick-looking. He sat with Roy sometimes, but he was through talking. He was ready to get back to his life, to get back to other people.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 172

   You're still alive, he told Roy one day. I've been thinking about this. You don't get to experience anything anymore; your life stopped for you when you died. But things are going to keep happening to me because of this, and that makes you still alive, in a way.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 169

 So then he was thinking of Roy on the beach and the seagulls and in this way he tortured himself each day and night under the guise of trying to fill his time and survive.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 167

   I didn't mean to rush this, he told his son. I know this is your burial. It should be something special and your mother should be here, but I just can't do anything about all that. I just... and here he stopped and didn't know what to say. All he could think was I love you, you're my son, but this bent him so that he couldn't speak, so he wept and shoveled in the dirt and mounded it and packed it and walked back to the cabin in near darkness, not caring much anymore whether he lost his way.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 152

 And he untied Roy and carried him back to the bedroom, then felt so lost all of a sudden he lay down on the bare wooden floor in the bedroom and just moaned for the rest of the day, no idea at all in his head as to what he was doing or why. The room was cold and dim and seemed to stretch on forever, and he a tiny speck lost in the middle of it.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 147

   He saw the sleeping bag propped up there with Roy in it and realized he had forgotten about Roy for a few minutes. The thought that he could do that seemed terribly sad, but he didn't stop and indulge himself. He had work to do.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 136

   He touched Roy's jacket then, and shook Roy's shoulder gently. Then he looked at the blood on his hand and back at the stump for a head that was all Roy had now and then from inside him he begain to howl.
   And howling did nothing but fill itself and he was like an actor in his own pain, not knowing who he was or what part now to play. He shook his hands oddly in the air and slapped them against his thighs. He pushed himself back farther away from Roy but this was phony, another act, and still he didn't know what to do. No one was watching. And though it couldn't be his son there, it kept being his son there.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 129

   Listen, his father said. Man is only an appendage to woman. Woman is whole by herself and doesn't need man. But man needs her. So she gets to call the shots. That's why the rules don't make any sense, and why they keep changing. They're not being decided on by both sides.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 124

   When he turned the radio off, Roy asked, If you talked with her and she wanted you to, would you leave here right away to go be with her?
   His father shook his head. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just missing her.