David Rhodes > Quotes

“We are all connected in ways we cannot even begin to fathom. Our lives unfold through each other and within each other. What one suffers, we all feel. What one does changes others forever.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“We are not separate, and I want you to know that. We are all part of one thing, and nothing good has ever passed or ever can pass away. There is no way out, but there is a way in, and when one person feels lonely like a ghost it touches us all.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Telling the truth is always wrong if it threatens those for whom being wrong can never be true.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“He was inefficient in the old sense of the word; not incapable, but unwilling to be seduced by work--unwilling to be singleminded. Those things that needed to be done were constantly put off for those things that needed to be thought about. And unfinished projects did not pester him to be completed, but represented, in themselves, thoughts he had not finished thinking....”
― David Rhodes, The Last Fair Deal Going Down

“You show how much you love someone by being there for them when they need you, by knowing what they need and anticipating those needs.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“Winnie would never be free of religious thinking, and she couldn't imagine ever wanting to be. She just needed a new schedule for her faith, one whose appointments with the divine were arranged not only through sermons, songs, and scripture, but rather on a walk-in basis with rocks, water, air, blood, space, and time.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“what I really want are thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind. Bring me books by women who have fallen out of step with society and refuse to march and sing the old songs. Books by men who through terrifying sacrifice overcome all the challenges set before them but one. Find me books by sensualists who drink their cups dry every time and yet never figure out why they’re so thirsty, and books by pious men and women who continue to believe that being good will save them. Bring me books about people in love, people so passionate about each other they will stand against family, community, country, fortune, and fame in order to be together, and books about people who don’t have a chance in hell yet somehow find one. Bring me books about the fear of God and the depths of nature, books about history, philosophy, psychology, science, and motorcycles.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“His psychic wounds presented a more complicated challenge. Something was needed in addition to the autonomic remedies provided by dreams, shaking, weeping, hollering, sweating, and vomiting. For true recovery -- involution -- Blake required satisfactory relations with other creatures over extended periods of time, and lots and lots of rest ... Blake could sometimes imagine what a reasonably balanced state of mind would be like. He could almost picture a less haunted edition of himself, sense an inheritance that might come due someday.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“Winnie trusted in the possibility of redemption. Life would not end in an apoplectic implosion of frustrated desires, foiled schemes, and defeated dreams, but rather in revealed glory.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“He wondered if there were other places in the universe where the rules of the living did not require feeding on each other - where wonder could be discovered without horror and learning the truth did not entail losing one's faith.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“[He] accepted me for what I was and it wasn't fair of him not to give me the same chance to accept him in the same way.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“The things that wound us are the most important things we know,”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Mourning the passing of their youth made them jealous of young people and resentful of all the things young people do. Consequently, she and other old people inclined to remember themselves in childhood not as children but as miniature adults and their parents as patron saints of irreproachable stature. They did not recollect ever stepping outside the margins and viewed willfulness in modern children as a sign of emerging pathology.”
― David Rhodes

“she also tended to see strangers not as individuals but as representatives of types. It was as though people did not walk around in the world as themselves, but as examples of kinds of people, the majority of whom they had never met.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“The roof leaked and the toilet flushed with the kind of diminished enthusiasm that often precedes serious septic difficulties. She”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Contrary to what you may think, the legal system was neither founded upon nor designed to reflect the common decency found in normal human relationships. It primarily works like the rules for a lunatic asylum. It tries to govern people driven insane by the inflated idea of their own worth.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“(The name Wisconsin is believed by some to be a derivation of the word Wishkonsing, place of the beaver.)”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Depression-era memories. They could easily recall events—and spoke of them in earnest detail—that occurred before electricity, telephones, and interstate highways.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“listen for the intention of what people say and ignore the words.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“What good is freedom, Mrs. Helm, if you never do anything unusual or odd? That’s what freedom means—doing whatever you need to do so long as nobody else is hurt by it. That’s what you were talking about before, doing things that conflict with your sense of yourself in other rooms of your mind. You have to be able to do that or you’re not really alive.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“It could mean that some unknowable Spirit ruled the world & directed his actions, or perhaps that he had simply been lucky. Perhaps it meant that the avoidance motive - fear - should be ignored in all-important matters. The Room of Vital Wisdom may be empty, he thought, but shut should not prevent us from going inside.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“At moments like these it is hard not to wish for an end to suffereing--a cancellation of it. But friends, a life without grief is hardly worth living, and someonee who is not willing too give his or her life for soomething worth more than mere living is hardly alive.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Someone may someday figure out how to distribute all good and bad things fairly. Maybe you can do that, find a way for even the most unfortunate people to have the same opportunities as the rest of us. Maybe you can discover how to make sure that only those who truly deserve wealth - or poverty - will have it. Perhaps you can find some men and women who after overthrowing the corrupt fools now in power will not become corrupted themselves. As soon as you find them, let me know. Let all of us know.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“The dead forever change the living.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“The compulsion to protect children from physical and psychological damage provided the cornerstone upon which all civilization had been built, one guilt-ridden decision at a time.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“human beings we have the obligation to transcend law through mercy. If we all had to live by the law, we would all be condemned—all of us. It is only by showing compassion and mercy that we create a better world.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“Jerseys were for people who were afraid to milk Holsteins and too ashamed to milk goats.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless