Kent Russell > Quotes

“I did not hear your name when they were beating up for volunteers.… I am sorry to think I have raised a timid son.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“It’s the same something feared by any ass-kicker who finds himself in medias res, hacking through the thick of it, knee-deep in the dead. He feared that, were he ever to stop, the mind he needed to keep trained on a target might instead turn on him.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Later, he’d tell me that combat happened subconsciously. No thoughts, only effervescence. This feeling of a million fizzes rising one on another. I’ve since wondered: Is that what unconditional love feels like?”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“i think once you’re able to not be totally dependent on your parents you start to receive them a little more critically”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“It’s an old term, “white trash,” older than the United States of America itself. Its roots lie in the seventeenth century, when “lubbers” and “crackers,” these formerly indentured and escaped white servants, formed their own communities on the outskirts of the Chesapeake tidewater region. These whites flouted the colonists’ nascent cultural mold, disrespected their ideas of property, color, and labor. The mass of men thought them boondock curios, except during political and economic crises, when they considered them criminal savages. “White trash” nowadays is a contemptuous term. It implies that one had all the privileges of whiteness but squandered them; one’s poverty is one’s own fault. It’s a shocking term, because it suggests that even without unions and factories, class in America is real, and it cuts across racial lines. But mostly it’s a useful term, because it has no set definition. It’s protean. It’s for when the majority of white people want to delineate what they are by saying, “What we are not is them.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“But now, with a volunteer military, my decision not to serve was simply another choice I was free to make, like choosing not to go to church. It was the sum of my conscience, my ambitions, and my own best interests.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Serious” film strikes me as absurd. It’s bowdlerized life. Filmic drama asks me to care about loves, losses, supposed triumphs—things that together amount to the chiseled dash connecting my birth to my death on my tombstone. To me, the modern horror film has more to do with first-world existence as it is lived today. In the modern horror film, we no longer come together to defeat an existential threat, gaining knowledge of and confidence in ourselves along the way. Altruism is not rewarded. Even the most self-sacrificing character will be killed off, often for laughs. One protagonist, if any, makes it out alive by becoming more brutal than the monster. He trades debasement for survival, which is short-lived—because of course the monster comes back, for the lucrative sequels. In horror, characters are stripped of everything they think they know and believe they are. Education and privilege mean nothing. Security is a delusion; today is the last day of the rest of your life. You, what makes you you, your blemishes and singular characteristics, will disappear in an instant. Stalking everything you do is death, and all that matters is how furiously you go out.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Now, I am become Dad, destroyer of beers.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“But now, Grandpa was always comin’ down on us. He said we weren’t ready for when life attacks. He called dad a nothing-master. And a bluebeard. And fatty-tatties. And he called me a playboy man-baby. That made me imagine a crazy magazine. Dad tried to call his old friends. Local wizards, I’m sure, masquerading as store managers. But he hung up the phone slow, and sad. Dad said, ‘The worst thing about living here is that you can only kill yourself once.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Obviously, we didn’t condone the act. We didn’t condone it, and we knew it was wrong. We understood how it could happen, sure. But we also considered the killers pussies. For succumbing to the pressure.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“He wasn’t lucky enough in his early life to have developed the capacity to metabolize love. I’m fairly certain that without it, he today is cold pride and latent rage wrapped up in an unfeeling vessel. A homegrown IED, waiting to go off.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“I don’t want you thinking about the military. It hurts me to say this. I believe in the military as an institution. But I don’t want you fighting their war. You’re too valuable. Let their own sons fight for them.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“But I also thought that I had less entitlement to this country than everyone else. I feel like America’s this big circle, and I’m outside the big circle looking in on it. I’ve been away for so long doing weird shit in a weird country. I see everybody and how they act and I don’t understand. People treat me different if I tell them I was in the army. I like to sink back and be in the crowd, so I don’t tell anyone I served.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“I can’t study in the library because every person who walks by, I have to raise my head from the textbook and evaluate them as potential threats. I can’t sit in the middle of the library. I sit in the corner with my back to the wall, with good lines of sight and proximity to an exit. I’m completely paranoid now. I don’t carry a firearm here only because it’s illegal to do so in Illinois. I know that’s not normal. But I’ve seen so many lives snatched from seemingly nowhere. I learned from that. I’m not going to be a victim.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Strapping, blue-eyed brothers, harvesting corn in 2012! No incessant Instagramming, no real-time Twitter updates: Jacob’s got the reins, FML.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“I am homesick most for the place I’ve never known.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“We visited a swimming hole nicknamed Lake Hepatitis that was the kelly green of putt-putt hazard water.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“You begin to understand why public libraries are so popular with the indigent,: I said.
" A comfortable space where you don't have to literally buy time just to sit there?"
Glenn agreed. "Sign me up.”
― Kent Russell, In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida

“My theory has been: human beings are not meant to go hand-in-hand the whole stretch of the way. Or even part of the way. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood—that sounds fucking intolerable.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“First they try to get you to reenlist in Afghanistan, because the bonus is tax-free. Then back at Bragg, they try to get the dudes who aren’t going to reenlist because they want to have a life, have a family, go to college. They try as hard as they can to get them. “A few months before my time was up, they’d bring me to meetings even though I’d long since told them I wasn’t going to reenlist. They said, ‘You can get all this money, you get all this great camaraderie. You really gotta make this decision.’ Then, a few weeks before I was out, the meetings went, ‘You’re not going to make it on the outside. You’re going to live with your mother. You’re abandoning all your brothers. What are you, a pussy?’ “They try to alienate you; you’re the guy trying to get out at that point. ‘Oh, he’s not a team player.’ Some guys are so fucking brainwashed when they’re over there—this is all you know. You don’t even know what the civilian world is like anymore. You’re in the zone. The army is all there is.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“That’s what I’m worried about. You guys,” he said as our car crossed into Marin County. “Don’t get me wrong—young people have always been thieves, dissemblers, and opportunists. But your generation? You guys seem … egregious.” I guffawed, a little too loudly. Then, as one, we declaimed this new sharing economy. Where agreeableness is popularity, and popularity value. Where well-being, both financial and emotional, depends on the esteem of others. On the traffic driven by their Facebook posts and retweets; on their appraisal of my like- and dispensability.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“If al-Qaeda wants nukes, that’s their fucking problem. People are gonna have nukes. People are not gonna like America. People are gonna have different forms of government. Does that mean we have to go over there and destroy them? No. That’s un-American.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“This is not any attempt to research your Great American Novel, is it?” Dad wondered. “Spoiler alert: a group of shitbirds merged with a newer group of shitbirds.” “Look,” I said. “Even if they were fieldmasters, and even if we remain peckerwood, I’d still like to know the stock whence I sprang.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“We did have a few blissful early years. I mean, I believe we did; I can’t really recall. My memories of years one through four are so suffused with warmth and golden light that they have become indistinct, indiscernible. They remain not as visual traces but as a single nebulous feeling: my mother present with me, holding me, the air around us growing denser.”
― Kent Russell, What Is Due the Other

“What do you want me to tell you?” he said, stopping. “That it’s easy? It’s not. It’s hard. Every day, it’s hard.” He was not looking at me. He was standing close, uncomfortably close, and pointing his ear at my chest as though calling through a door. “Every day, even still, I want to say, Fuck it! and hail ruination like a cab after last call.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“You can be a juggalo, or you can be white trash—the first term is yours, the second is somebody else’s.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“Suffering itself is the point. Shame is medicine, and to drink enough will cure you of anything.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“A parent’s duty is to protect his child. A parent is relieved of this duty only in the grave. I could never forgive myself if you were hurt or killed and I could have prevented it.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“I am so spiteful. I see recollective Sunday brunches among friends, and I want to walk up to them and ask, You’re all best buds? Really? You’re all ready and willing to bear the weight of love’s deep and diffuse obligations? Oh, word? It’s not just that you’ve self-selected from this sinking ship the people most amenable to your personal brand of resentment and narcissism—your mimetic desire—to float on in a life raft together over bitter water for at least as long as supplies last? Then I chokeslam myself through their table.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son

“That would become his prime directive. A native strain of the Golden Rule: I will leave you free to do what you might like to do, but I expect you’ll do the same for me. Imposition being not just bad parenting—worse, it’s un-American.”
― Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son