Jim Lynch > Quotes

“I hate myself pretty often" .She tilted her face back on the pillow, damning tears and attempting so smile at the same time. "Pretty fucking often”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become then what you are.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life "unseeing." I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“Something had snapped between us, and I had no idea how to glue it back together.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“True love is a tiny pearl, easily imagined and easily lost.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“I was a fluke in a classroom full of flukes on a planet overpopulated by flukes.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“...that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all accurately, and even then you'd often fall short.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“I'm not worried about you because you don't get it your own way. You never have, and believe it or not, that makes you extraordinary.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish summer in which i was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.”
― Jim Lynch

“If you don’t feel any connection to the ocean, then ask yourself why your tears, blood and saliva contain about the same percentage of salt.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“It surprised me to want her [my mother] the most, but I'd never been miserable without her.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“I pointed out how the eel grass lay flat on the beach, and asked them to imagine what it must be like to live in a forest that worked like a folding stage prop, going from three-dimensional to two-dimensional twice a day.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.”
― Jim Lynch, Truth Like the Sun

“Some people blamed his oddities on his dyslexia, which was so severe that one giddy pediatrician called it a gift: While he might never learn how to spell or read better than the average fourth grader, he’d always see things the rest of us couldn’t.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Know something though,” Teddy says on the inhale. “Been meaning to tell you this: enough is never enough with you. And it’s not healthy. It’s like an addiction. “
“To what?”
“To more.” Smoke flares out of his nostrils. “You can’t get enough of anything.”
Roger rubs his cheeks and averts his eyes, wondering if it’s that obvious he’s increasingly driven half-mad by the limitations of having only one life. All the things he’ll never see or do or understand. All the people he’ll never know. “Whatever you say,” he finally says.”
― Jim Lynch, Truth Like the Sun

“Know something?” Brandon said. “I think the most interesting people I’ll meet these days will be criminals—or people about to become criminals.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Was it even a Cutlass? He could tell trucks from cars and sedans from compacts, but beyond that he was guessing.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“But with thousands honking simultaneously it is a wildly different noise, like the tribal roar you hear in stadiums, yet even greater than that, beyond animalistic, more like an enormous avalanche or the howl of the earth itself, the high-pitched hum of the sphere, if you could actually hear it, hurtling through space at sixty-six thousand miles an hour. Brandon tilted back and joined in, honking along with the flock until it split into long loose Vs and the bedlam faded to an industrial squeal, then to an ambient wail as the skeins turned to threads before fading to blue.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Yet aside from the Angie distraction, it was starting to feel like the summers before it, with long, anonymous, and forgettable, but nearly perfect days away from stuffy classrooms, sloppy joes...”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“Don't get me wrong. Most of the force is made up of brave and honorable officers protecting us as I speak. And Mr. Shelton was apparently driving erratically before he was pulled over, and he did have an outstanding warrant on a weapons charge." He quieted the grumbles by raising a hand. "Regardless of what actually happened, I think it's fair to ask if he'd been a white man driving erratically in Laurelhurst or Broadmoor, do you think he would've been shot?" He was talking over a chorus of unh-uhhs now. "I don't think so either, and that's not right.”
― Jim Lynch, Truth Like the Sun

“Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become than by what you are.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“How do you read that sentence, yawn and turn out the lights?”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“Though Brandon claimed to be six-six, because that was all the height most people could fathom, he was actually a quarter inch over six-eight-and not a spindly six-eight either, but 232 pounds of meat and bone stacked vertically beneath a lop-sided smile and a defiant wedge of hair that gave him the appearance of an unfinished sculpture. His size always triggered unreasonable expectations.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I’ve heard since school got out.” I couldn’t even look at him. “Cheer up,” he said. “I brought some real entertainment.” He pulled a brittle copy of The Godfather from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven—he knew the sexy page numbers by heart—in which some imaginary woman described how big this imaginary Sonny was to”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“...shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one brief flash.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

“...shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light.”
― Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide