Jeff Long > Quotes

“Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave.

Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light.

There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“What a remarkable conceit civilization is,”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Children were brought to see him. His legend spread quickly. Wherever he went, it was known that this was a holy man, captured with small houses of souls around his neck.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Life’s too short for doubt, and yet too long for faith.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“And in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Once again he could hear the planet’s joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone. Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself. He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of God. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth. Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence. He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he passed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold. Time passed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“...and the old monologue rolled around in her head. It was like a broken record, her mea culpas. The fact was, when she dove, she dove deep. Controversy be damned. She was forever running ahead of the pack.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Ali was close enough to recognize him as a warrior simply from the distribution of his scars. It was a forensic fact that primitive fighters classically presented their left side in battle.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Surrounded by enemies, there were officially no enemies for them. With civilization at large trickling down shitholes like Mogadishu and Kigali and Port-au-Prince, the “new” Army was under strict orders: Thou shalt have no enemy. No casualties. No turf. You occupied high ground only long enough to let the politicos rattle sabers and get reelected, and then you moved on to the next bad place. The landscape changed; the hatreds did not.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“If you let it be just as it was, the world was a surfeit of riches. Hold still, and the entire universe was your lover. But it was too late for that.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Later it would be called a decimation, which means the death of one in ten.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Stick,' he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“The landscape changed; the hatreds did not.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Ali liked the smell of herself at night, her honest sweat.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“By dawn, good would triumph over evil, light over darkness - the usual fairy tale.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Do you ever ask yourselves who you can really trust?' Walker folded his contract and closed it in his daybook. 'Let me submit that the one thing in this world you can always trust is self-interest. And now you know mine.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Bordubur is off limits to all field archaeology now. These lower regions within the hillside were especially not to be disturbed.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“All at once, Ali felt powerfully isolated from these people, estranged and peculiar. It was not a new feeling. She had always been a little different, from her classmates as a child, from the novitiates at St. Mary's, from the world. For some reason, she hadn't expected it here, though.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Their seduction of her had begun. No great mystery there. It was the seduction of a storybook land, the seduction of becoming an expatriate. You fell for a place like darkest Africa or Paris or Kathmandu, and soon you had no nation of your own, and you were simply a citizen of time. He'd learned that down here.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“We were his ruin. She saw that now. They had doomed Ike with their dependence. He would have been a thousand miles away if not for their weakness and ignorance and pride. That’s what had kept him bound to them. Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“In all the thunder of gunfire, Branch knew his rifle ran empty only when it quit hunching at the meat of his shoulder.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Hunter and hunted, one in spirit.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“If I am your demon,” says the angel, “then you are my author. Because I am anonymous unless you recognize me. If you see evil in me, it is only because you needed a release from your own evil. In which case, my salvation lies in you forgiving your fictions and legends. But if, on the other hand, I am your author, then you are the demon. Because you have rebelled against me. In which case, your salvation lies in me forgiving you.”
― Jeff Long, Deeper

“Nude, she felt the warmth of the lamps on her flesh. From the corner of her eye, she saw the light from twenty eons ago turn her into gold.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Sandwell was wrong. It didn’t matter what Ike said. In his experience, people made their own judgments, regardless of the truth, even when the truth was clear.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent