Randall Silvis > Quotes

“Понеделникът пристигна като товарен влак, дълъг километър и половина и пълен с радиоактивни отпадъци."

"Чернова", Рандал Силвис”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Reading...can make you fell like not one lone cell stranded in the desolation of the world, but one of eight billion cells conjoined by the world, all hearts echoing the others in the song of one enormous heart.”
― Randall Silvis

“Spin and die, To live again a butterfly.”
― Randall Silvis, Only the Rain

“We are all made up,” he answered aloud. “We are only real at night.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Huston conducted all of his relationships from a solid center, from within the stabilizing orbit of his family, always venturing out from and returning to family, with his every action and reaction synchronized with family first, family last, family always, whereas DeMarco, on the other hand, had no center. He ventured out to the other relationships from emptiness, and to emptiness he returned. Every action synchronized with nothing. Emptiness first, emptiness last, emptiness always.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“People don’t have to be perfect for you to love them,” he said. “You understand what I’m saying? Sometimes you love them because they aren’t perfect. You love them for their imperfections . . .”
― Randall Silvis, Only the Rain

“The Name of the Rose and J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea?”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Personally, I’ve come to believe that theories are of small value when it comes to actually living your life, to making all the hard decisions you have to make and then dealing with the consequences of those decisions.”
― Randall Silvis, Only the Rain

“Laying another log on the fire of failure”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“It’s funny how when bad things start happening in a series, it almost seems as if they’re all related somehow, as if each one is causing the next. I remember you talking about that one time, about what you called your Domino Catastrophe Theory. You said the universe is filled to the brim with bad things waiting to happen, not only the universe of everything but also each one of our own personal universes too. “There’s a 50–50 chance that one fuckup, no matter how small, is going to trigger another one,” you said. “And if that happens, there’s a 70–30 chance that the second one will trigger a total clusterfuck.”
― Randall Silvis, Only the Rain

“and could hear her susurrus breath sounding like leaves stirring”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“the dead leaves blowing about his legs like brittle, papery demons sucked dry of all power, impuissant and doomed to crumble.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“Evil exists, boy,” he told patient Hero, “and it will always exist in abundance, if only to give the good an opportunity to shine.” He scratched Hero’s skull. “Truth #4.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“Behind him, the lights of Erie appeared to be underwater now, a twinkling city sinking into an indigo sea.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Hard times destroy the weak and strengthen the strong. Soft times weaken everyone.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“recognize their own vituperous thought shaming.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“Because poets and pretty, young things still believe in romance. They still believe that truth heals and beauty sutures. They still believe that love forestalls, deters, and turns away the tragedy that is life.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Instead of focusing on Flores and Emma he paid attention to his surroundings, let his gaze move about as freely as possible along the winding country roads. He looked at the houses, the farms, the woods and passing fields, and he isolated certain details that he found attractive or interesting, the yellow glow on window glass, a gray cat poised to pounce on a field mouse. He glanced up at the sky, the thick white clouds layered like trifle. There was a softness to all that he saw, a trick of the golden light and the stillness and the openness of the land and sky. Soon he found himself slowing and enjoying the slowness, taking note of all the sights that pleased him. He lowered”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it.

Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational.

Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Everything a person does is manipulative, isn’t it? Every kiss, every handshake, every kind or harsh word. It’s what we do, who we are. Some of us are better at it or more obvious or more deceitful than others. But we all do it.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“It was a kind of Occam’s razor for law enforcement that adultery explained nearly everything. Infidelity. Lust. Stupidity and weakness.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“Nathan said, “Not a chance. I’ve heard him recite it in class. He knows dozens of Poe’s poems by heart. ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘The Lake,’ ‘To Annie’…dozens of them. Sometimes I think he fucking channels Poe.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“useful knowledge was to be acquired only by doing, by living, by running headlong into the burning house of human experience and coming out singed and scorched, lungs full of smoke. Such knowledge would arise not during but after the experience, when you are sitting alone in the dark and re-creating everything you did and felt and assessing the wisdom or foolishness of each moment, the penalties and rewards.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“There is a significant difference between feeling like a failure and admitting failure. The first can be a driving force; the second is the relinquishment of all effort, and therefore all hope. DeMarco understood this in his bones but had never articulated it to himself or anybody else. It had taken Thomas Huston to put it into words for him. They had been sitting on”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“sober as a corpse, I used to tell him.”
― Randall Silvis, No Woods So Dark as These: A Literary Thriller

“The avidity with which we thieve and kill and ruin one another! The flesh is undeserving of the souls with”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“Beckett’s famous existential cry at the end of The Unnamable, which he now quoted aloud, just as he had many times throughout his life: “‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“simply being laconic.”
― Randall Silvis, When All Light Fails

“He sagged against the tree, clung to it, pushed hard against the horrible images while he chanted to the bark, She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Her mouth is sensuous but sad, limbs long and elegant, every movement languid…”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone

“front”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone