Joseph Kelly > Quotes

“short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“I wasn’t even pretty or nice like my older sisters and I just couldn’t do the girl things they could do.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“Just about the time when moods change, inevitable seasons of a day, transitions from one color to another, that hour or minute or second when the sun is finally defeated, finally sinks into the realization that it cannot with all its power to heal or burn, exist forever, there comes an illumination where the sun and earth meet, a final burst of burning red orange fury reminding us that although endings are inevitable, they are necessary for rebirths, and when that time came, just when I switched on the light in the kitchen to open Abuelita’s can of soup, it was probably then that she died.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“It was agreed upon,” Percy wrote, speaking in the passive voice of a decision that ought to have been his alone, “to put the children to death, the which was effected by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water.” This”
― Joseph Kelly, Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin

“when I heard my father’s voice on the wind.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“Many people think that the church simply took over a pagan holiday, but that is not so. As Sextus Julius Africanus had shown, there were good reasons for celebrating the feast of Christ’s birth on December 25, and sun and light symbolism played a very great role in Christian worship.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Feast of Christmas

“flambeaux,”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“because Christians believed that the death of a holy person was a new birth in heaven, and they honored that date.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Feast of Christmas

“Ask two people long married about the day they met, and though the facts might remain the same, each will color the event with their own perceptions,”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley.3 He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories

“Her particular brand of minimalism is sometimes called “Kmart realism,” because she writes about and uses language that seems perfectly natural to the middle and lower-middle-class, rural, and small-city Americans who shop there.”
― Joseph Kelly, The Seagull Book of Stories