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161 " 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. "
― Peter Heller , The Painter
162 " In my position with the first reports coming in I should have known. She sat up straight on her haunches and she cried silently. "
― Peter Heller , The Dog Stars
163 " But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman’s screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks. "
164 " broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. "
165 " Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. "
166 " Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they’d been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with a bird flu. We called it the Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and blamed on New Delhi. But that’s probably not where it originated. "
167 " 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. "
168 " 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. "
169 " Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that. As simple as that we go over the edge. "
170 " In truth, Celine never went too long without eating. HALT. It was her AA training. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired - don't let yourself become any of those, if you can help it. "
― Peter Heller , Celine
171 " other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably "
― Peter Heller , The River
172 " There were curtains of night gray that curved against the wind and in them it was almost as if he could see the lives of his mother and of his best friend, their spirits, coming to him. It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. "
― Peter Heller , The Guide
173 " And in each loss was some further exile. Celine wondered just then what the word "home" must mean to her. Probably a space within the relative safety of her own skin. "
174 " Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not knowing it. Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it’s too late. "
175 " He also came to see in the long hours of trying to work through his heartache that maybe he had been just as ruthlessly shallow and opportunistic as she had been: she’d wanted to indulge in a local boy who wore flannel shirts and could fish and cut wood and was as at home sleeping under the stars as she was in a five-star suite, and he’d wanted to date the daughter of a star who moved through the world like a different species. But really she was just a young girl who was far from home and probably scared, and he was much more cultured than he let on and had spent more hours in the art museums of Boston and New York than he cared to admit. He just had never had eggs Florentine. "
176 " I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it. "
177 " 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. "
178 " It was that time of day, or night, that happens only a few weeks a year at a certain hour in certain parts of the American West. The sun sets behind mountains but the cloudless sky that is more than cloudless, it is lens clear -clear as the clearest water - holds the light entirely, holds it in a pale blue as if reluctant to let it go. The light refines the edges of the ridges to something honed, and the muted colors of the pines on the slopes, the sage-roughened fields, the houses in the valley - the colors pulse with the pleasure of release, as if they know that within the hour they too will rest. "
179 " They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in the water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell. "
180 " Rich people are another species. Sort of lost in their own way. It’s a good thing they have country clubs and shit because it keeps them kinda corralled up in one place. Jack had surely decided that neither one in that marriage of scientists was very appetizing. "