John Gregory Brown Quotes

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

We make sense of the world, some philosopher once said, only through its rearrangement, through a constant shift in perspective coupled with a slight movement of this or that here and there and then here again. In that manner, in the imperfections such movements reveal, the truth becomes apparent.

Maybe there wasn't, after all, a clear motivation for any of the things that people did. Maybe they just did them for no reason at all or because of stupidity or selfishness or cowardice or anger or for reasons that made no rational sense - because the clouds happened to be a particularly gloomy shade of gray that day, because the barking of an old dog chained to a sycamore tree just happened to sound exactly like the crunch of soldiers' boots on gravel or the hum of bees like an engine in the head driving you mad.

Eventually I came to understand some of what was at work between my father and Murphy. Unable to meet each other on equal terms, they chose not to meet at all but to orbit around each other like two separate planets of entirely different composition. It was, I realize now, the way my father dealt with just about everyone, including his wife and children.