Brad Watson > Quotes

“Life is not fair in that way or any other way. We are who and what we are.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned.”
― Brad Watson, Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories

“She loved most being in the woods with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“She looked at him. She thought that indeed he might love her, in some way. The love of one human being for another, which does not demand classification or mode.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries. Early on she acquired ways of dealing with her life, with life in general. And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing — perhaps only horses and something she couldn’t quite name, a strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“All things of this nature, apparently unrelated - torrential storm, the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold raw oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom, a pack of wild scruffy dogs a-trot in a field, the thrum of fishing line against the attack of a bream, and peeling away from the delicate frame of its bones from the sweet white meat of its body, a smooth and hard oval nutshell rolled in a palm, the somehow palpable feel of fading light - were in some way sexual for Jane. Not that this was how she would or could have expressed it, especially at that age. She felt it inside herself, though, as deeply and truly as a lover. She fell into the grove's rough, tall grass and into darkness, some charged current running through her in pleasant palpitations of ecstasy.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“She was not afraid of cyclones in the darkest bile-green-and-black skies during storms that cracked off the limbs of oaks and the tops of pines and made the tin roof of the house and gallery pop and groan and bend upward at the edges. Nor of the hail that pocked the tin like buckshot raining down. Nor of lightning that split trees their length and left smoldering charred skeletons rooted to the wet, scorched earth. She was not afraid of God, with his sly and untrustworthy balance of love and wrath, who was yet curious enough to make himself vulnerable and walk among humans just like herself in the beautiful, harrowing embodiment of Jesus.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“For the first few months she was pregnant with the girl who would become Jane, she pretended that she was not. That it was a false pregnancy, simply her body fooling with her, playing an evil joke. This figment of a child in her womb would go away, disappear like some temporary derangement of the senses brought on by God or the devil for reasons she could not divine. But at four months she could feel it quickening, and by five months it had begun to move around quite a bit, to thrust and kick and stretch so she could not pretend it was anything else. By seven months in she had begun to talk to it. I will try to do right by you, she said, if you promise that you will try to do right by me. Do not die before I do. Do not come out a defective child doomed to unhappiness or an early death.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“She understood somehow that she was lucky in her special way to love these events without the complicated, pressing question of physical love, to absorb life from the center and its periphery at once, so she could for a while take it all in with the sweet fullness of the entirely human and the utterly strange, without apprehension or fear.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“Well she never thought life would be so full of meanness and disappointment. She hadn’t been prepared for it.”
― Brad Watson, The Heaven of Mercury

“Whereas all her life her mother had more often than not been in conflict not only with others but with herself, her own circumstances, angry about one thing or another, mostly dissatisfied and even resentful of her lot in life, now she seemed to have let that go. But in its stead, there appeared to be nothing. As if she had finally fully burned her ability to care about anything in the long-stoked fire of her discontent. And now she was empty.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“Birdie's two front teeth were gapped, which gave him a strange stirring in his heart. But she was no more claimable then for sappy loving sentiment than she ever would be, and would always deflect his attempts to moon...She had a face, it seemed to him, that was unreal somehow, as perfectly unreal as a doll's yet with the capacity to open, become human in an instant, and suck him in unawares...she would turn her eyes to him and before he could gather his far-flung self again she had drawn him into her like some stronger, brighter heavenly body. He was possessed, almost, something essential in him trapped in her, trapped but not entirely uncomfortable. He could never quite reconcile her real presence with what her presence suggested to him, and it kept him not only enchanted but also confused in some deep sense he couldn't grasp.”
― Brad Watson, The Heaven of Mercury

“Jane had never seen the look in her eyes she saw then. She almost looked empty. And for the first time Jane could remember, she saw her mother as a woman whom life had made not just hard but also exhausted and plain. Older-looking than her years.

Then, as if she could read the unspoken words in Jane's eyes, her mother's expression darkened again. Her own eyes glistened, about to shed tears.

'What would you know about 'life with a man'? And what of your little experience in this world would make you think it such a fine thing?”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“Papa?' she'd say.

'Yes.'

And sometimes they would say no more than that, as if that were enough, or all there was, a generic reply to her all-but-unspoken query into his condition. She sat and looked at his lean, hard profile, now bearing the wire-rimmed spectacles, and wondered what he was seeing as he stared straight ahead into the yard beyond the porch, seeming deep in thought but saying nothing.”
― Brad Watson, Miss Jane

“from miserable, starving children’ to ‘picking winners’,”
― Brad Watson, Child Sponsorship: Exploring Pathways to a Brighter Future

“...he was less fearful around the dead than the living...It was that he and the dead shared the same secret, which was that the fearful illusion of mortality - and immortality, as well - is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear. Only the dead see one another, and themselves, for what they truly were, or are. The terrifying idea of time did not apply at all.”
― Brad Watson

“-It'll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everyone becoming some kind of light shade if brown. That's what it'll be one day.”
― Brad Watson

“It’s funny about hearing, the way it goes. She finally got her hearing aid to work right, got it to squeak, but that lady down at the nursing home said she just took hers out, said she’d heard enough already.”
― Brad Watson, The Heaven of Mercury