Home > Author > Peter Heller
101 " 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. "
― Peter Heller , The Dog Stars
102 " 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. "
103 " 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 otterI love otterUnder a muskrat:I love muskratBeaver:I love beaver "
104 " One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice. "
― Peter Heller , Celine
105 " If one concentrated on one thing and then another—the good things in each moment—the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter. "
― Peter Heller , The River
106 " life was about being agile in spirit and adapting quickly. "
107 " There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice. "
108 " 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. "
109 " 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. "
― Peter Heller , The Painter
110 " felt bad but couldn’t help myself. It was Jasper, not just. It was all of it. Was this hell? To love like this, to grieve from fifteen feet, an uncrossable distance? "
111 " I think it’s a terrible invention. Nobody knows how to read a map anymore. You chase down a blue line but you have no idea where you are in the world. Like a rat in a maze. How do I ever know where I am in relation to Pikes Peak, or the South Platte? Or God? "
112 " I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do. "
113 " He really your dad? Yes. On my father’s side. "
114 " On this side were only low hisses, a ticking and chirping, a simmering crackle like a million crickets, hellfire crickets, singing of apocalypse and char. "
115 " I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die. "
116 " Ich schließe meine Augen. Was da drinnen los ist. Was da zappelt, was da wie ein blinder Fisch durch den Schmerz schwimmt, für immer und ewig. Was da lebt, was bleibt. Was sich erneuert, die Liebe und den Schmerz lebendig hält. Die Liebe ist das Flussbett, das sich mit Schmerz füllt. Es füllt sich jeden Tag aufs Neue mit Tränen. "
117 " Fitting. This was one of our favorite camps in the world. Year after year. If his spirit could look out. To the changing creek, season to season. I lay him in wrapped in the quilt and I say Goodbye, bud. You are Jasper. My heart. We are never apart, not here, not there. "
118 " You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been. "
119 " She must have been freezing, and it filled Pete with gratitude for the no-bullshit people of the earth, the people who knew what had to be done and would find their own damn coat later. "
120 " Distantly recall. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That’s what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter. "