Josh Quirion > Quotes

“With the water whooshing easy underneath, the stars hanging lazily overhead, and Meadow Jackson holding him like this and him holding her like that, Everett determined that he would catalog this moment. Recording moments was a practice he’d learnt from his mother when he was a boy. 'Whenever a special time leaves you with that bodiless feeling, like you are happening to it, and not it to you, record it,' she told him. 'Those moments have the ability to defend you during the longest, darkest nights. In those moments,' she’d say, 'you feel as though you could reinvent the world or eat it whole.”
― Josh Quirion, Towners & Other Stories

“Their last night in the clouds was comparable to the others, with one exception. They didn’t sleep. Instead, they touched life fully and felt downright complete in the small darkness and shelter of the tent.

They drank coffee and were well awake in the endlessness of the unforgettable now. The bags beneath their eyes were testaments to a life worth living, and at sunrise, they sat together on the mountainside and learnt something about infinity and about each other.”
― Josh Quirion, Towners & Other Stories

“The city’s skyline beheld from the Champlain Bridge at midday evoked in him a sentiment of unqualified ignorance—it seemed to laugh at the size and purpose of him.”
― Josh Quirion, Towners & Other Stories

“Everett did not drink regularly. He despised hangovers and discovered that the only effective remedy for them was sobriety.”
― Josh Quirion, Towners & Other Stories

“IF THE PROUD PAPER BIRCHES in the forest behind MacAulay’s Lumberyard could speak, they might speak of the young men who gathered there at nightfall on the last Sunday of every month. They might speak of the characters of these young men, of their unyielding resolve, of the marks, the cuts, and the scars on the faces of those who’d spent more time inside the thick manila rope strung waist high around four trees that formed a nearly perfect square—the Maker’s Ring. They might also tell of the young men’s civility, of how matches were seldom interrupted by onlookers because of foul play, and of how boxers in attendance week after week did not present themselves in the ring to injure one another, but to learn from one another, and to learn from themselves. They might tell you that every time one returned to the ring, always he appeared more assured and self-possessed than the last. He threw fewer punches and eluded more. He drew more prolonged breaths, and his feet were ever-lighter; the command of his movement always be-coming more calm and calibrated, the accuracy of his hands more fixed and unambiguous. They might tell of these young men’s fathers, or of these young men’s sons, of how the ground covering their old roots has welcomed the company of young men for generations. They might tell you, if you were listening, any of these things—but surely, they’d tell you of Everett Winter, and of how they missed him.”
― Josh Quirion, Towners & Other Stories