Morgan Talty > Quotes

“But one thing is for certain, I thought: you are who you are, even if you don’t know it.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“I wonder if How'd we get here? is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is How do we get out of here? Maybe that's the only question that matters.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“We are made of stories, and if we don't know them--the ones that make us--how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“We’re all alike, even when we’re not.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“There is that terrible memory, surely, but so too are there sweet ones, the tiny memories with the tiny details that are milder in climax, no doubt, but equally powerful...”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“That's my life, though--not knowing, but wishing.

[Charles Lamosway]”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“When you’re in need, even the person you hate or distrust the most is someone you can rely on, especially when they, the hated, know they are needed for something important.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“how strange it is to want something you did not like, or something that seemed a bad part of your life. But maybe, like most things, it wasn’t all bad.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“I wished that the near impossible would happen: that a passing space rock would collide with it, shatter it to pieces, and send it broken toward the stars.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“But it was true—this rezservation was for the dead.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“In the moments before my eyes shut, hearing Frick snore and the clock tick toward 4:00 AM, I felt like I knew Robbie, felt like I had memories of him where he took me fishing or hunting, and when I couldn’t take the fish off the hook or when I couldn’t kill the white rabbit, he told me that was fine, and he unhooked the fish—it’s jaw popping, gills throbbing—and plopped it into the river, or he took the rifle from my hands, and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“When she was in one of those dark places, she used to worry about anything and everything. A loose nail, a strange passing car, a heavy rain, a heavy snow, or no rain, no snow.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“...I was thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, never ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.

[Charles Lamosway, referring to Louise, his mother]”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“…and then when it got no brighter she’d pack up and leave as if to chase the sun so it could never set.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“I hadn’t been there since I was nine, since the time Frick had finally made me put a bullet in a rabbit’s head that hadn’t even turned fully white, this little thing in between changes, in between something larger than simply molting, simple brown to white.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“It’s best to expect nothing,” he said. “That way you don’t get your hopes up.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“...what's more sacred than laughter at the dinner table?”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“But sometimes I can’t help but feel I should have gone. Like it would have made something I cannot name not so lonely.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“For days coming off that methadone I fought with Mom and I cried to her and she shushed me each time I sat up and tried to get up and at some point Mom spoke to me—not to my body—and she said, “You’ll be back soon,” and the next thing I knew I envisioned Fellis’s truck reversing to a stop in front of Daryl on the ground who laughed and pointed at me and said “earthquake” and I split in half.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“…and so no wonder I want to free my leg from where it’s trapped under the side of the car and when I do there is no pain not unlike childhood and red swings and returnables of all hard glass and laughter and the good feelings there in the dark, and when I look at my leg the skin is peeled back my pulsing meat in my face and I grab the flap of skin and flip it over my exposed bone and have you ever tried to walk in such a time of great rupture?”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn’t live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn’t make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little. “You’re nothing.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“The phone rang. It was curious to hear the house go so quiet, to hear only the phone and nothing but the phone, and right then I realized that it was no longer the day Grammy made Robbie smoke all those cigarettes, but the day after. I never thought much of the hours between midnight and waking in the morning as being part of the next day. It had always felt like an in-between time, but there was no in-between. It was always now.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“How’d we get here? I’m starting to think that each time I ask it, each time I consider an answer, I wind up farther away from where I should be, from where I was. Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it—maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“...Gizos began to cry. Not a little, a lot. Since that day I've never seen a boy, or a man, cry that hard. Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body and spirit's self-recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit's communicating to another's body and spirit in one and only one language--that of deep, deep emotion--between the flesh of two free bodies. I say 'free' here because it's true--what is freer than that, freer than one body welcoming and receiving another's in a state or condition so unchanged since the very beginning of bodies, a state or condition that has continually been jailed time and time again since that very beginning?

[Charles Lamosway]”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“Peter Jennings was gearing up to a segment about NASA and Pioneer 10, how it sent its last signal, and how NASA had no plans to contact Pioneer 10. No plans! None. The metal ship was going to keep on going way out there in quiet, quiet glides of black, and since it was a thing, a machine, it couldn’t see like us, and we way back here would never, ever know if the machine was okay. I wished that the near impossible would happen: that a passing space rock would collide with it, shatter it to pieces, and send it broken toward the stars.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“Then the tribe’s business was saved, just for a time, when they partnered with some contractors to manufacture tactical landing light systems for the US so aircrafts could identify landing areas. Not sure why the tribe stopped making those—maybe the US had landed in every possible place so they no longer needed Indians to help them out.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“...Gizos began to cry. Not a little, a lot. Since that day I've never seen a boy, or a man, cry that hard. Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body and spirit's self-recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit's communicating to another's body and spirit in one and only one language--that of deep, deep emotion--between the flesh of two free bodies. I say 'free' here because it's true--what is freer than that, freer than one body welcoming and receiving another's in a state or condition so unchanged since the very beginning of bodies, a state or condition that has continually been jailed time and time again since that very beginning?”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“What's more sacred than laughter at the dinner table.”
― Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

“The Island was quiet and dark. Houses were awake if their outside lights were on; houses were asleep if you didn’t see them in the dark, if all they seemed to be were masses of dense black pulsing between the surrounding trees.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“But I don’t tell her that I thought she was dying. I don’t tell her how much my legs shook, how my voice quivered when I said, “Mumma, mumma, mumma.” I don’t tell her how little and alone I felt. I don’t tell her how I’ll always bring her cigarettes, how I’ll watch that movie for sure.”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez