Home > Author > Peter Heller
61 " 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. "
― Peter Heller , Celine
62 " All the choices we can't see. Every moment. "
― Peter Heller , The Dog Stars
63 " 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. "
64 " They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man? "
65 " Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run. "
― Peter Heller , The Painter
66 " What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days. "
― Peter Heller , The River
67 " Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. "
68 " With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to. "
69 " Can you fall in love through a rifle scope? "
70 " Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying? "
71 " 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. "
72 " 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. "
73 " He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so…what? Essential and lovely. "
74 " 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. "
75 " Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence. "
76 " 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. "
77 " She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole. "
78 " 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. "
79 " What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead. "
80 " The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind. Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness. "