David Joy > Quotes

“Empathy's not standing over a hole looking down and saying you understand. Empathy is having been in that hole yourself.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“Some souls aren't worth saving, I thought. There're some souls that even the devil wants no part of.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“It’s funny how it only takes one person taking the time to show you they care for all that bad shit to not seem so bad for a moment. It’s not like the demons go anywhere. What haunts you is still right there when you go back under, but that one gesture from one person can bring you to the surface for a second or two. And for a very long time, all I’d really needed was to come up for air.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Light never shined on a man like me and that was certain. In a lot of ways, that made men like Daddy the lucky ones to have only ever known the darkness. Knowing only darkness, a man doesn't have to get his heart broken in search of the light. I envied him for that.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“It had never been that addicts don’t care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“You still can't see it and it's right in front of your eyes. It's the reason we're gathered here. The only reason we're here is because of the ones we loved. That the line that held us.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“There are some things worth dying for and some things worth killing for and some things that could make a man do all sorts of things he never knew he was capable of until the time came to do them.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“What I'm saying is that it's easy to take the high road so long as there aren't any stakes. But the minute you've got something to lose, a man'll do all sorts of things.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“Dwayne understood that his brother was not meant for this place, that some people were born too soft to bear the teeth of this world. There was no place for weakness in a world like this. Survival was so often a matter of meanness.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“I'd never had anyone ask me to let them in. Inside was a place most folks wouldn't have ever wanted to glimpse, much less be a part of, but Maggie had always been banging on the door. Maggie had always been trying her damnedest to take part of the weight off me, and I'd never let her. I couldn't let her then, and I wasn't sure that I could let her now, but the one thing that was for certain was that I'd carried that weight for too long. I'd carried it until I was almost broken, and the only thing that had ever come along and offered to fix any of it, whether she held that power or not, was her.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“It wasn't here or there that had ever been scary. It was the middle ground, that long desolate space between, that scared the hell out of me.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Eventually all of that pain and anger just sort of fades away, and all we're left with is growing old and forgetting.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“In a way, I think they knew she was already gone. They knew it just as much as I did. A girl like that couldn’t stay. Not forever, and certainly not for long.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“I wasn’t old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he’d never have to love her again.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface's roiling a reflection of what's buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden.”
― David Joy, The Weight of This World

“His mind retreated to a place more familiar. There was a sergeant who told Thad the infantry were the hands of God, and that idea made sense to Thad because it was no different from what he had heard all his life growing up in the church. The old-timers said some prayers needed feet. But there was evil in this world that had to be strangled. And so it wasn't just a matter of giving those prayers legs. Sometimes a prayer needed hands just the same."
--Thad Broom, The Weight of This World”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I'd wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“You never had a mean bone in your body," Dwayne said as he looked across the floor to where his brother rested against the cobbled wall. And true as it was, the world's cruelty had found him just the same.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration. Life is sustained by death, and though going to the field is an act of taking responsibility for that fact, the killing is not easy, nor should it be.”
― David Joy

“Hope and faith are loaded guns. Everything I had ever been taught told me things that were too good to be true usually are. It was a silly thought to think that I could get out of these hills. It was a silly thought to think that the life I was born into was something that could be so easily left behind. Some were destined for bigger things, far off places and such. But some of us were glued to this place and we live out what little bit of life we were given until we were just another body buried on uneven ground.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“His mind retreated to a place more familiar. There was a sergeant who told Thad the infantry were the hands of God, and that idea made sense to Thad because it was no different from what he had heard all his life growing up in the church. The old-timers said some prayers needed feet. But there was evil in this world that had to be strangled. And so it wasn't just a matter of giving those prayers legs. Sometimes a prayer needed hands just the same."
- Thad Broom, The Weight of This World”
― David Joy

“Holding onto history is not nearly as important as where we're headed. Pride matters less than power.”
― david joy

“At the end of the day that statue is nothing more than a chunk of granite and copper sitting in front of the library. That statue matters a lot less than the end goal. Holding onto history is not nearly as important as where we are headed. Pride matters less than power.”
― David Joy

“Most of us knew things that we didn't even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the same truth holds for all of us. Each of us have a current location and a destination. The only difference between those two points is the space between and yet so many stay shackled to exactly where they've been their entire lives because they're too goddamned scared to take a chance. We fear the middle ground between those two points. We fear change and so we settle for the safety and security of staying put. It takes an act of bravery to walk into that "vast gap" where we don't know what will happen. It takes an act of bravery to know exactly what you want and to walk fearlessly into the in-between with a confidence and pride that nothing can stop you but yourself. Jacob does just that. And as sad as that ending may be, as misdirected as he may have been in choosing that destination, I think there's a lot to be learned in how fearless he was in that moment.”
― david joy