Peter Heller Quotes

Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.

I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.

Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. And no need to thank even. Just be. Just fish. Just walk up the creek, get dark, get cold, it is all a piece. Of me somehow.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV.

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.

Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. (244)

Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late.

She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

Too - about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been.

Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don't think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.

Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can't say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that.

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it.

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared.

We have traveled.
Now you will be the path
I will walk I will walk
Over you.

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

Ve used for years. When the rubber wears out I've got more. On the last

I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.
This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you'd find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone ...
My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter
I love otter
Under a muskrat:
I love muskrat
Beaver:
I love beaver

What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.

Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

Nothing decided, nothing finished.

Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment.

Is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him. CAWWREAACHH.

A road trip frees the mind, revitalizes the spirit, and infuses the body with Dr Pepper and teriyaki jerky.

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?

The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it's killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

I tried with every ounce not to, not to weep as I saw my world, everything in it of any importance, vanishing from my grip. In

It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

We can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you're not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.

Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

I once had a book on the stars but now I don't. My memory serves but not stellar, ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about.

The other is how I could have loved Cristine so fiercely, who was such a world champion bitch, who even came after me once with a kitchen knife.

Still. No resolution ever. None. Nothing decided, nothing finished. The Dipper wheels back into place. Just one turn. One turn of the wheel and we are different, never the same. Not ever. Not even those stars. Even they, they decay, collapse, coalesce, break apart. Close my eyes.

I'd say it was a relief to have at last nothing, nothing, but I was too hollow to register relief, too empty to carry it.

Once he said: I'm a time bomb. Which he didn't have to tell me.

There was something satisfying in a cessation of paddling on smooth water. It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.

the End of Everything meant the End maybe for all time, maybe in all the universe, of Golf.

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

Dont pretend to be that small, you are not that great!

One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary really.

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children's blocks.

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all.

This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is
well you can't even look at it.

Desert trees that don't grow up but grow gnarled and thick. Stunted and stubborn. Remind me of Bangley. They just refuse to die at any price. Some

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

She was very easy to please, because she took joy in the smallest things, but exacting, too, because that small thing must be authentic, and wondrous in its small self, and not any kind of bullshit. She could detect bullshit from a hillside away. But then she took people at face value and expected the best of them until proven otherwise.

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you.
When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.

Can you fall in love through a rifle scope?

I figured in the fuel, the guns, two rifles, the shotgun, the handguns, four grenades. Period. Two quarts of oil. I scratched a nub of pencil

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys-- of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain.

Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence.

There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.

we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The

At this stage they were killers. I mean this stage in our mutually culpable history. Who

Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.

You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward ... Then it sits with you. The pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend, steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath, unaccompanied by another. And underneath the big stillness like a score, is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then, the pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.

It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don't even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.

The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato. Like my heart swelled and my skin got thinner and thinner in the heat of it. Of company.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don't you think? If you don't melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you've really done something to crow about.

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps

It's early spring, some late or early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not

I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.

Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not know it ... Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it.

Referring to sheep experiencing a plane takeoff - As far as they knew, all this represented the next stage in the normal life cycle of a sheep

We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty.

I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse.

Hey where are the old stakes for the beans? Where did we put em? Jasper's ears came up and his mouth opened in his version of a smile. He didn't know. He didn't give a fuck.

He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.

Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later.

What a fool. In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I

In the November 2006 issue of Science, a report by an international team of scientists studying a vast amount of data gathered between 1950 and 2003 declared that if current trends of fishing and pollution continue, every fishery in the world's oceans will collapse by 2048 ... The oceans as an ecosystem would completely collapse.