Taylor Brown > Quotes

“It wasn’t dying that she feared, it was dying bad: leaving her grandboy alone in the world, unprotected, his wounds unhealed. Death, which walked ever through these mountains, knew she would not go down easy.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“You like to think that people, in general, and I mean on the scale of generations, are learning from their mistakes, getting better. But with what all I seen, I don't know if I could believe that.”
― Taylor Brown, Fallen Land

“Christ's father let him die on that cross. I understand why he done it. But Christ never had no granny like me.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“You die down there, you better hope I live a real long time. Because that's all the goddamn peace you're gonna get.”
― Taylor Brown, Fallen Land

“Sometimes, when I'm falling asleep, I think of breaking the latches on every lion and tiger cage in the world. Those cats streaming like fire and lightning into the night. Maybe, if we were forced to feel like prey again, like animals, we'd have a little more respect for the rest of the creatures we share this rock with.”
― Taylor Brown, Pride of Eden

“We are rock, Moo, till the stars fall and the seas dry up. They will break against us.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“You ask me, Crock, there’s different Americas. America if you got means or don’t, if you work in a tie or neckerchief, up in the office or down on the killing floor. White or colored, man or woman. Native or not. I reckon there’s Americas they’d drop a bomb on, and ones they wouldn’t even think it.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“Let them remember. We are rock, Moo, till the stars fall and the seas dry up. They will break against us.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser. –Mother Jones”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“Multicolored glass bottles, too many to count, dangled from the branches on tied strings. The evils come skulking over the far hills, out of the lightless hollers and dry wells—the bottles captured such spirits. Contained them. Kept them out of the house, out of her grandson’s dreams and heart. When the wind came sawing across the meadow, you could hear them moaning in their bottles, trapped. The spirits were mean, she thought, but they weren’t very smart.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“She knew they would kiss their daughters' foreheads anew tonight, or squeeze their hands especially tight - feeling the thin, strong wires that strung their flesh - or they would simply stand at the doors of their bedrooms, watching them sleep, unable to believe what astonishing creatures had come of their blood.”
― Taylor Brown, Wingwalkers

“They were sitting underneath a large oak. He lowered his head between his knees and buried his face in his palms. He tried to stop the sadness from welling out of him. She rubbed a slow circle between his shoulder blades with her palm. He pressed his wet face against hers. He remembered the soft cheek of his sister and mother, both lost so long ago, and the rough cheek of his father, too, whose face he could hardly remember. Everything before this shore like a myth to him, unreal, all his memories sunken in the earth so dark underneath the peat. But this, that cheek—it went to the core of him, to all he’d lost.”
― Taylor Brown, Fallen Land

“Some things were too big to be spoken. Too terrible or sweet. No words could hold them. Only silence seemed honest.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“Some say that we are not but islands ourselves, chance masses of cells each smaller than a grain of sand, bodies formed and unformed by wind and sea and earth. I say that may be so, but no island is truly an island. It is part of a chain, a submerged range. Such are men, not alone, but each bearing the sands of his ancestors, and all of us pulled together, together, by what but love?”
― Taylor Brown, Wingwalkers

“They wear red bandannas knotted around their necks, as if their throats have already been cut. People will call them primitives and hillbillies, anarchists and insurrectionists. They will call them Rednecks.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“These brickhouse Christians, they feared misfortune like a curse, like something they could catch by touch or word or tongue.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“Death presided over these lands like an entity itself, a thousand shreds of the same dread spirit just looking for an opening, a wound or weakness of character. Once in, it was tough to get out.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“In practice, those high ideals made it a nation of deep hypocrisy—a country ever on a knife’s edge, ever failing to live up to its own principles. A nation ever in conflict with itself.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“here was an army of the hollow-eyed and grave—”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“Prayed and prayed. Not to the church-god, exactly. To her own. One that lived closer, up on the mountain, perhaps. For here was a place fit for a god to live, not in any building or book. Here she was understood. She was wicked, sure, but no hypocrite. She had fought every day of her life, same as the beasts of the field. The bloody Christ nailed naked and roaring to the cross—his bones iron-split, his body whip-flayed to the meat—he was hard as they come. Surely he prized grit, a game heart. Same as she did.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“His heart was a crazy thing in his chest.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“Christ’s father let him die on that cross,” she said. “I understand why he done it.” She leaned closer, whispering in his ear: “But Christ never had no granny like me.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“They are a hundred men at first, then two hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. An army of men rising from the earth, clad in blue-bib overalls. They hail from Italy and Poland, the Deep South and Appalachia. One in five is Black. They wear red bandannas knotted around their necks, as if their throats have already been cut. People will call them primitives and hillbillies, anarchists and insurrectionists. They will call them Rednecks.”
― Taylor Brown, Rednecks

“I like the story of the blind elephants better,” he said. “Yeah, what’s that?” “Six blind elephants. First one feels a man. Says, ‘Man is flat.’ Rest of the elephants feel the man, too.” Anse looked at her. “They all agree.”
― Taylor Brown, Pride of Eden: A Novel