Robert James Waller Quotes

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

It already smells good," he said, pointing toward the stove. "It smells ... quiet." He looked at her.
"Quiet? Could something smell quiet" She was thinking about the phrase, asking herself. He was right. After the pork chops and steaks and roasts she cooked for the family, this was quiet cooking. No violence involved anywhere down the food chain, except maybe for pulling up the vegetables. The stew cooked quietly and smelled quiet.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

In a way, women were asking for men to be poets and driving, passionate lovers at the same time.

The old dreams were good dreams; the didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again.

Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.

God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.

His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen.

I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit.

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

I made that horn sound like it never had before; I made it cry for all the miles and years that separated them.

She was more of a business partner to him than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself ... and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind.

Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was seething of a gypsy.

As much as I want you and want to be with you and part of you, I can't tear myself away from the realness of my responsibilities. If you force me, physically or mentally, to go with you, as I said earlier, I cannot fight that. I don't have the strength, given my feelings for you. In spite of what I said about not taking the road away from you, I'd go because of my own selfish wanting of you. But please don't make me. Don't make me give this up, my responsibilities. I cannot do that and live with the thought of it. If I did leave now, those thoughts would turn me into something other than the woman you have come to love

You make pictures, not take them?
Yes. At least that's how I think of it. That's the difference between Sunday snapshooters and someone who does it for a living ... I don't just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit. I try to find the poetry in the image.

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps.

Robert, there's a creature inside of you that I'm not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you're gentle with me. If I didn't fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back.

This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies ...

I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert

Maybe now and then if it's absolutely necessary to cushion someone from a world gone too harsh and bitter.

Realities that kept the music silent, the dreams in a box.

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.

If there's no need to climb, then there's no reason to learn how to climb.

... on being somewhat antisocial-
"You have less people at your funeral but you get more reading time.

No secrets, no mystery. no mystery, no life worth rememberin'. no life worth rememberin', no life worth goin' on.

Something I've never been able to adapt to, to understand is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter. I don't dare say anything about it, though. Richard and his friends would be down on me in a flash. But there's some kind of cold, unfeeling contradiction in that business.

Neither of them spoke, they simply stood there, sending, receiving, imprinting the feel of each on the other, indelibly.

She wore ribbons in her black hair and clung to her dreams

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.

Maudlin makes it difficult to enter the realm of gentleness

Talisman, Talisman, show me your secrets,
Helmsman, Helmsman, turn me for home.

And, man he cried when he talked. He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play.

When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.

If only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

Life is never easy for those who dream.