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1 " It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. "
― Russell Banks , The Sweet Hereafter
2 " Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. "
3 " I’ve got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It’s just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you’re a parasite of sorts. "
4 " Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible. "
5 " For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. "
6 " [...] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death. "
7 " Because it's anger that drives us and delivers us. It's not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers. "
8 " It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here. "
9 " I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred. "
10 " But twins are like that. They behave in ways, especially regarding each other, that can seem very strange to someone who is not a twin himself. They have a morality that is different from ours-at least when they are young they do-because, unlike other children, they are not inclined to imitate adults until much later. To children who are twins, even when they are not identical, the other twin is both more or less real than everyone else in the family, and they deal with each other the way that we deal with ourselves alone. Which means that it's like twins are permanently stoned. I don't think that's an exaggeration. "
11 " Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself. "
12 " Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at the bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That's not courage. "
13 " The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living. "
14 " I can't help it, and I'm not sorry for it; I'm even a little proud. People think I'm cold and unfeeling, but that's a price I've always been willing to pay. The truth is that I'm beyond help; most people are; and it only angers me to see my sisters or my friends here in town wasting their time. To forestall or cover my anger, I jump in front of them, and suddenly I myself have turned into the person come to provide comfort, reassurance, help, whatever it is they originally desired to provide me with. I take their occasion and make it my own. "
15 " From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different. "
16 " Angry? Yes, I'm angry: I'd be a lousy lawyer if I weren't. "
17 " Listen, identify withe the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators. "
18 " A dog-it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren't there, or aren't exactly there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That's my training as a driver, but it's also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels. "
19 " I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts. "
20 " Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it. "
