Tim Johnston > Quotes

“Long after everyone else has given up and gone home and gotten on with their lives, he would keep on believing because, without evidence, you could never kill his belief.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Here is a hilarious, surprising, tender, always genuine tale of American youth in the crosshairs of the new century--a battle of growing pains culminating in a bloody headlock with nature, family, machismo, activism, and love. CB Murphy has written a terrific and timely novel which speeds by and ends, like youth itself, far too quickly.”
― Tim Johnston

“You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain?”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Because you could not talk to the world. You could not pray to it or love it or damn it to hell. With the world there could be no discussion, and with no discussion there could be no terms, and with no terms there could be no grace.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“There was such randomness in the world, the passing faces told him, such strange and meaningless intersections—this man could be him, or this man.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Now I wonder why a man lives so long he doesn’t even know the world he’s in anymore.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“An old aunt of mine told me one time, Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“The boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“It’s a poor carpenter blames his tools.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“And it wasn’t Wyatt down there in the hard ground now; it was just his body, just the organic remains of what he’d lived in while he was on the earth and the rest of him, the most of him, had gone back into the world. Because life was organic and that was one kind of energy, ashes to ashes, but there was also energy between living beings, currents that traveled between them outside of biology, and that energy could not be buried, and neither could it fade into nothing, because energy never just ended, it transformed and recycled and you felt it even if you didn’t believe in it. Souls. Spirits. Whatever you called it there was a current and you were in it always and you couldn’t bury it. He”
― Tim Johnston, The Current

“One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“And how will you know him, Grant? How will you recognize this bad man God has sent you?” “That’s the easy part,” said Grant, and he looked up from his hands and Billy saw his eyes in their sockets like small openings to some blue flame of the skull. “I will know this man because he will be the next man who attempts to hurt anyone I love.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“A man doesn't really ever know himself. He thinks he does, but he doesn't. There's something in him that goes deeper than anything in his raising or his beliefs or his badge or whatever the hell he lives by. And once he reaches that place, well. Right and wrong are just words.”
― Tim Johnston, The Current

“Leaving’s hard,” he said. “But it ain’t the hardest thing. Is it.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I like a good story, don’t get me wrong. But a man should never be the hero of his own stories. Nobody likes those stories.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“A year by the calendar since she’d vanished, one hour by the heart.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“But neither does He permit them not to bear it. Therefore He asks His children to bear the unbearable.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught. —W. B. YEATS”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does. It just breaks and breaks and breaks once more.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. The most absolute, the most terrible love.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“What we chang’d Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I walked down the hall and found him fully clothed, arms at his side, dead-center in the big white bed like a human bookmark.”
― Tim Johnston, Irish Girl: Stories

“Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Did anything bring home the meaning of time like the human face? And did Jeff see the same, looking at you? Or was he used to your older face because he saw it every day on your brother?”
― Tim Johnston, The Current

“Belief never stood a chance against disbelief,”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“but herself. The small woman doctor walked ahead of him. Her brother walked on the other side of the bed and a man she didn’t”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“and he carried the blackened pizza still smoking on the cookie sheet to the front porch and shucked it into the snow,”
― Tim Johnston, The Current

“And it wasn’t Wyatt down there in the hard ground now; it was just his body, just the organic remains of what he’d lived in while he was on the earth and the rest of him, the most of him, had gone back into the world. Because life was organic and that was one kind of energy, ashes to ashes, but there was also energy between living beings, currents that traveled between them outside of biology, and that energy could not be buried, and neither could it fade into nothing, because energy never just ended, it transformed and recycled and you felt it even if you didn’t believe in it. Souls. Spirits. Whatever you called it there was a current and you were in it always and you couldn’t bury it.”
― Tim Johnston, The Current