Brad Parks > Quotes

“I'm not saying it's simple to find and tell the truth. It takes a great deal of hard work, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, and a willingness to keep listening to people even when your gut is telling you they're full of it. Then it involves drilling through the layers of one's cultural assumptions and prejudgments, all the way down to the mushy middle of all of us, where I believe there's a basic humanity that tells us what's right and what's wrong. If we as writers apply that code - without the anchors of agenda or ideology - we can lift our prose to something that can be called the truth. It's the very best of what journalism can and should be.”
― Brad Parks, Eyes of the Innocent

“I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.”
― Brad Parks

“My entrance into the courtyard caused a small stir among the lookouts. I could tell because in the middle of February, in the dark of night, Baxter Terrace suddenly sounded like an Audubon Society refuge - birdcalls being the latest in urban drug - selling counterintelligence...

Birdcalls allowed much more information to be imparted to other members of the operation, without the visitor being aware of what was being communicated. So while a crow's harsh cry could harken the arrival of a member of the city narcotics unit - a significant threat - the sweet song of a chickadee might signal an officer who was merely escorting a social worker to an appointment allowing business to continue in guarded fashion. Someone like me, a stranger on unknown business, might warrant a whipporwill's call.

Where exactly a city kid learned what a whipporwill sounded like, I have no idea. But these kids were nothing if not resourceful. It makes you wonder what they could have accomplished under different circumstances.”
― Brad Parks, Eyes of the Innocent

“…through the years, I had come to realize a simple fact of reporting: if you approach people with respect, listen hard, and genuinely try to understand their point of view, they will talk to you, no matter how different your background is.”
― Brad Parks, Faces of the Gone

“In some ways, no one is tougher on one another than sisters. Like parents, they're hyperaware of another's past foibles and faults; but, without the infinite parental capacity for love and forgiveness, they judge one another far more harshly for them.
I swear there are times when they really might kill one another. Until, of course, one of them is in trouble or threatened by an outside agent, in which case they band together into an unbreakable front.
Internally fractured yet externally united. The world over, it's the very definition of sisterhood.”
― Brad Parks, Say Nothing

“It's one thing to be threatened. It's quite another thing to be threatened in grammatically incorrect fashion. I felt like some basic right as a literate American had been violated.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“Some people describe their cats as curious or playful or affectionate. Mine is best described as dormant.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“No way you can get stuck. Your head is much smaller. Look at this big coconut of mine. It's practically Jupiter. Yours is more like, I don't know, Mercury or something."

"That doesn't mean I'm going along with an idea that you're pulling out of Uranus."

We both stopped to snicker. Hard to resist a Uranus joke.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“What the hell happened to you?" she demanded. "What took so long?"

"My car got towed."

"Okay, but why did you swim here?"

"I walked. It just happens to be a hundred and fifty-seven degrees outside.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“When Matt talked about particles being in two places at once, I understood it as a mother. I always existed in two places simultaneously as well: wherever circumstance had placed me, and wherever Morgan was. The only interruption during those next few quiet minutes was when the court reporter walked in and took her seat in the corner, where her steno machine had already been set up.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“I have to be honest: at this point, we’re looking for zebras.” “Zebras?” I said, sure I had misheard him. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’? Well, in this case, we’ve looked for all the horses. So we’re left with zebras.” “Great,” Matt said. “I’ve always wanted to go on a safari.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“When you’re throwing legal spaghetti against the wall in the hopes that something sticks, it always helps to have more noodles.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“you needed sunshine and clouds to make a rainbow.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“I am a member of that vast, indistinct, perpetually confused congregation of the spiritually nonreligious. Which is to say I believe in something; I just can’t tell you what. On some core level, I know there is something bigger than me out there, something I feel when I stand on top of a mountain, or gaze up at the stars, or look into my child’s eyes, something that has long moved humanity to search for metaphysical answers.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“suppose you could say it had been a place of comfort for workingmen and a place of work for comfort women.”
― Brad Parks, Faces of the Gone

“Part of what makes quantum mechanics so difficult to comprehend—and so different from the simpler models of physics that came before it—is that it’s a world where no one can tell you exactly how something is going to play out. There’s no certainty. Just probability. Einstein hated this. “Gott würfelt nicht,” he fumed. Commonly translated as: God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“We all have our illusions in this world, and we cling to them.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“Scientists have demonstrated that once you determine certain properties of one member of an entangled pair, you instantaneously and irrevocably change the other. And this mysterious coordination remains intact at every distance yet measured”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“What's up?"
"You tell me; you're the one calling.”
― Brad Parks, Faces of the Gone

“I did my best to rid the house of corn syrup and insisted we add kale smoothies to our dinnertime regime, as if the whole problem with Matt’s diet was that it wasn’t trendy enough.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“favorite country song—no, her favorite song, period—was “Bless the Broken Road.” And not the poppy, Disney-fied cover by Rascal Flatts. The original, soulful acoustic version by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”
― Brad Parks, Unthinkable

“All the wrinkles of their days on this planet have been smoothed away and turned into one seamless narrative. All their trials and struggles have taken on the aura of parable. All their successes have been magnified, while their failures have been forgotten. And by the time they “passed on”—or “made their transition,” or “entered into eternal rest,” or any of those other wonderful euphemisms for the Long Dirt Nap—they seemed to have achieved some kind of understanding of why they walked this planet in the first place.”
― Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“Disorders of consciousness are a strange thing,” Reiner said. “If you’re having trouble walking, we look at your legs. If you’re having trouble breathing, we look at your lungs. But where do we look when you’re having trouble with your consciousness? Where is consciousness located? Can we stick a needle in it? What causes someone to go unconscious? What makes them wake back up? We’re not really sure.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“Wasn’t that one of the secrets to a lasting marriage? When one person was down or doubting themselves, the other person lifted them up, made them believe. Made them better than they would be alone.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“The human brain is hardwired with a fervent desire to make sense of the world, to create connections between events whether they exist or not. From a rationalist’s standpoint, it’s something of a design flaw. It’s what led ancient people to believe if they danced a certain way, the rain would fall. It’s what led modern people to believe vaccines caused autism.”
― Brad Parks, Closer Than You Know

“Sometimes the maternal drive felt less like a suggestion and more like a command. I stretched out beside Morgan, draped an arm over him, and snuggled as close as I could.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“they were always better together than apart. Fact was, you needed sunshine and clouds to make a rainbow.”
― Brad Parks, Interference

“We all eventually figure out that life is a gift, not a guarantee, and that there’s only one way it ends.”
― Brad Parks, Say Nothing