D. S. Briar > Quotes

“She was looking at her land the way a person looks at something they have loved for so long the love has become structural, part of the load-bearing elements, and they no longer examine it because it is simply the thing that holds everything else up.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“underneath the fear, something steadier: the particular steadiness of a person who has made a choice and is finding, in the making of it, that the choice is the right one. Not easy. Not certain of a good outcome. Just right.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“And then, with no warning and no invitation, my brain would return to the moment in which Nora crouched in front of me with her hands on my shoulders and her face showing something she had not chosen to show, and I would lose approximately thirty seconds to examining this with a precision that was not available to me when it was actually happening and was apparently available in unlimited supply in retrospect.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“She said that a person who runs doesn't always run because they're running away from something. Sometimes they're running because no place has ever been safe enough to stop.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“There was a fiddle player on the saloon porch and a man with a guitar who clearly knew the fiddle player well enough to follow whatever he started, and the sound of them carried down the street with the warm, rough pleasure of music produced by people who love it rather than people who perform it.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“I sat on Senator's broad back in the cold afternoon light and looked at the far pasture and felt something that I did not have a useful word for: something large and quiet and located approximately in the center of my chest, the way certain landscapes reach in and rearrange something structural without your permission. Philadelphia had not done this to me. Neither had Baltimore, or Santa Fe, or any of the train windows I had looked through in eleven months of being a person who did not stay anywhere. The landscape of New Mexico Territory had been making attempts on me since the train, and I had been holding it at a certain professional distance, filing it under beautiful, noted, moving on. This one got through.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“You don't frighten me," I said. She looked at me. "You're direct," I said. "Directness isn't frightening once you understand that it comes without malice. Most people haven't had enough of it to know the difference.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance

“The mountains came closer slowly, the way mountains do: as though they are not moving toward you but simply becoming more certain.”
― D. S. Briar, The Wrong Widow: A Sapphic Western Mystery Romance