Wayne Brown > Quotes

“So strange, that sense of a house no longer straddling past and present, but where past and present, withdrawn in their separate assumptions , stood apart and loathed each other, while all around them, in the untended yard outside, their common future, the bush, gained ground.”
― Wayne Brown, The Scent of the Past: Stories and Remembrances

“That was March ’91, and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what happened to Lillian, and knowing something of big cities and winter, and of the wolfish hearts of men therein – and recalling those cheekbones and the glossy dark skin, the good body, and the pulled-back hair – I don’t really want to know.”
― Wayne Brown, The Scent of the Past: Stories and Remembrances

“Then though , I look around me at the airport hustle, with its irritable cab honkings and clank of baggage carts, the spit and hiss of bus brakes, the lamplit shades hurrying to and fro in a New York night that is black, raining, and cold, with, ahead of us, the inconceivable press and milling of unseen souls, New York, city of dreams, or so it still sells itself, though for most who walk its canyoned street it is where the dream died, leaving them in graffitied apartments with bad heating and dark stairwells, riding the treadmill of two part-time jobs, or even three, the unending, mean struggle for survival…”
― Wayne Brown, The Scent of the Past: Stories and Remembrances