Daniel Mason > Quotes

“the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“thousand angels on a blade of grass.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“History haunts him who does not honour it.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.”
― Daniel Mason, A Far Country

“The conversations rests uneasily; one doesn't expect good-byes to be burdened by such trivialities. This is not how it is in the books, he thinks, or in the theater, and he feels the need to speak of mission, of duty, of love. They reach home and close the door and he doesn't drop her hand. Where speech fails, touch compensates.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“Out here, no one tears down anyway—one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Frost silvered the tops of the mountains, the winds shook the leaves from the branches, and each morning, the woods seemed thinner, as if the country were slowly showing him what lay within.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Passion sometimes gets the better of Reason.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“To mourn a lost friend, however, is not the same as wishing for another.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws—that hid within the canonical Four.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Such joy that your sweet company makes Does leave a shadow in its wake.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“From there, according to the map, a road should have taken her into the mountains, but the asphalt soon gave way to dirt, dead-ending at a long driveway flanked by those twin heralds of American hospitality, Private Property and Beware of Dog.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“At times I wonder if the reason I have lost track of time is that I will know when to return not by a date, but when an emptiness is filled.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Like all charms, it will lose its Magic when it becomes a Method.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“White. Like a clean piece of paper, like uncarved ivory, all is white when the story begins.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“That a charlatan could find her way into enough parlors of upstate New York and Western Massachusetts in the early years of the twentieth century to provide a comfortable living, was not, in itself, remarkable. Anastasia, however, was, in the spectrum of spirit rappers, table turners, and ectoplasmic spinners, a practitioner of such ability that on some level, she decided, what she did was a kind of magic of its own. She’d come to the profession by way of her sister, who had correctly sensed that the pale, wide-eyed girl possessed a certain affinity for the extraordinary, and had brought her to a séance, where Edith, perceiving that the medium had affixed a scrap of iron to her boot to tap out the spirits’ “answers,” decided, in a moment of pique, to out-channel the star, tossed herself upon the carpeted table, and arching her back and tearing at her bodice, cried out in the voice of a Roman emperor named Augustus Titus.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“seven of his works had been discovered in the attic of a Roxbury home belonging to the family of his former nurse. Despite her affection for nature, she had little interest in nature painting—she could never get past the freedoms that the artists took, the impossible juxtapositions, the imagined trees, the meadows of flowers that would never be found together. William Henry Teale, however, was something of a revelation—photographically precise and seemingly intent on recording exactly what he was seeing, rather than composing something pleasing to the eye. She could identify at least a dozen species in every work, down to his clubmosses, and his way of painting in the same spot across the years and seasons gave”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“being needed was not the same as being accepted.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“But such variance was rare. If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws—that hid within the canonical Four.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“A journey, then? But to where? To be cared for in their dotage by a spinster cousin in New Haven? Possible, likely even, but how dull! La Floride? Better—certainly more alligators. No, I know: one dispatched the other. A fight over a man, some handsome young horse trader who has been tupping one, then the other, in the barn. Hardly knows which one he’s with, but of course the old girls keep score. I peg Alice the murderer. Buries Mary somewhere in the woods and runs off with her lover, settles in San Francisco, where her guilt consumes her, sends her into a tailspin of drink and debt. Maybe she is still there today, one of those deathless madams, forever enticing fresh-faced laundresses into a life of vice. Too dark? Very well: how about a tour of the Continent? In our footsteps, in high-necked calico, apples in their palms, slipping through the Canals of Venice under the spell of a handsome gondolier. Alice with her easel, Mary recording her Travels to be lauded the Goethe of her time”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“It was only when it came time for bathing that he left again. He could touch her forehead, auscultate her lungs, he could bear the weight of her breast against his hand as he listened to her heart. But bathe her as she had bathed the soldiers? When he had once touched the rim of his canteen just to feel where she had pressed her lips? No: once in her ravings, her shirt had lifted to reveal her navel, her iliac crest, a little curl of hair above the symphysis, and Lucius had frozen, unable to look away. No, the thoughts of undressing her, the complex mix of fear and yearning, were too much for him to bear. But she was burning up. Better Zmudowski, uxorious philatelist, responsible paterfamilias. Lucius stood outside the door and watched the sparrows, listening to the slosh of water, the squish of sponge. Day three: the fever broke. The wound looked better, less purulent, its color less exuberant. He felt himself buoyed, only to touch her head two hours later and sink. The mercury reached the highest notches on the glass. This was worse, he thought—it meant the infection was within, unseen, a witch’s hex.”
― Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

“that being needed was not the same as being accepted.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner