Steve Yarbrough > Quotes

“It's a lot easier to say when something ended rather than when it began. Most of us can recognize the end from a mile away, but the beginning always slips up on us, lulling us into thinking what we're living through is yet another moment, in yet another day.”
― Steve Yarbrough, Safe from the Neighbors

“Every place is different, but every place is the same, because you carry yourself with you wherever you go.”
― Steve Yarbrough

“Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that.”
― Steve Yarbrough, Safe from the Neighbors

“At the age of twenty, I failed to grasp the difference between guilt, which can almost always be atoned for, and grief, which can only be borne.”
― Steve Yarbrough, Safe from the Neighbors

“IF THIS COUNTRY should ever reach the point,” the president was saying, while I sat on the floor with that bowl of popcorn between my legs, “where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
― Steve Yarbrough, Safe from the Neighbors

“He wasn’t what he was supposed to be. He was an imposter: a boy who’d chosen this place, and at that moment, to impersonate a man.”
― Steve Yarbrough, The Oxygen Man

“She prefers to think she became a better woman. But she has hurt her sister, and she knows it. The fact that she did it to save herself is no excuse. Nor is the knowledge that she's only done what writers do. A novelist is just a cottonmouth with a laptop.”
― Steve Yarbrough, Stay Gone Days