Malcolm Brooks > Quotes

“There's a type out there sees an architect or an engineer, an industrialist, as a sort of titan. A god among men. I don't figure the titan thinks much about it. I think he's a freak of nature, got eyes like steel, got a bulletproof heart. Guys like that don't compete with each other, they compete with all history and all the future too, and they do it with ice water in their veins. Maybe they're right, to waste not a minute wondering whether they might be wrong. How would them pyramids have come to be, weren't for slave drivers and forced labor?”
― Brooks, Malcolm

“Critters. Coulee and canyon and reckon-I-could. Fair-to-midllin' and fit-to-be-tied. Rig for truck. The polar opposite of gloaming and cataract, lorry and livery and bloody-well-right.”
― Malcolm Brooks, Painted Horses

“Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner; Some Horses: Essays by Thomas McGuane; Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy; The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana by Rick Bass; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich; She Had Some Horses: Poems by Joy Harjo; The Meadow by James Galvin; The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig; The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick; The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists by Gregory Curtis; From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories by Joseph Medicine Crow; The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark”
― Malcolm Brooks, Painted Horses: A Novel

“I'm just thinking, you might be the modern version of a war bride."
"The what?"
"You know, like when we were kids. Guy's shipping out, gets all panicked, pulls the trigger so to speak. This is the same thing, in reverse. Girl's got a job, heading for parts unknown, guy...You know."
"Pulls the trigger. So to speak.”
― Malcolm Brooks, Painted Horses