David Joy > Quotes

“There wasn’t any way out of that darkness but forward.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“The tree with the deepest roots in this country is a tree of White supremacy. And the thing is, you don’t have to be the one who planted that tree or even the one who kept it watered or trimmed the branches to be someone who directly benefits from the shade it provides. There’s a whole lot of people sitting comfortably under that tree, and some of them recognize where they’re sitting and just won’t do anything about it because they like where they’re sitting, and then there are some of them who won’t even acknowledge that the tree’s there at all. Maybe they don’t acknowledge it because they can’t see it, or maybe they just don’t want to see it, but in the end none of that matters because they’re all benefiting from the same thing.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“There’s a whole lot of people who care more about being called a racist than they care about addressing the institution.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“That kind of love wasn’t for anyone outside the two of them. It was private and silent, sufficient as grace.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“His mind turned instantly back to what had been troubling him over the past week. He was grieving the loss of a place and a people. It was hard enough to bury the bodies of those you loved, but it was another sadness altogether to witness the death of a culture. There was the gone and the going away, and there was the after. He found it difficult to imagine what would become of this place, harder still to witness what it was already becoming. For”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“You can be proud of where you come from and not proud of everything that history entails. That’s what so many of these people don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Them boys don’t read books. Only history they know’s whatever bullshit their daddy told them, and all he knows is whatever bullshit his daddy told him. They just use what they want and toss what they don’t, same as these people on TV do with the Bible. It ain’t never been about history, just like it ain’t ever had a thing in the world to do with a man on a cross.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I’d wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something. And if there had to be something, then there had to be God, so in some way or another I was a believer.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Lightning screamed sideways across the sky, and beneath a tall stand of pines was a place most wouldn’t have found comfort, but it was the closest I’d ever been to baptism. My mind cleared and that clearheadedness brought on a dream of setting the world right. It wasn’t vengeful or fueled by hatred, but rather a settling of debt owed, a righting of the world that had needed righting for a long, long time.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“Boundaries were strange to begin with—what belonged to who, and who belonged to where—all of these imaginary things treated as concrete so that our lives were governed by nonsense.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“For as tough as the men were in these mountains, the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world.”
― David Joy, The Line That Held Us

“There comes a point in life when all there is is remembering. A life is nothing but the sum of its yesterdays.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“Says an awful lot about a country that’d rather cut a man a disability check than fix him up so he can go find a job.”
― David Joy, The Weight of This World

“Most of us knew things that we didn’t even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“It’s good to be driven, but there’s a lot more to living than working it all away.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“The entire region had peddled tourism as some economic savior, never once acknowledging it as something equally extractive as timber or coal. Now that the people were here there wasn’t the infrastructure to support them. And worse yet, the people whose families had been rooted to this place for generations were being priced out.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“We traded our robes for business suits. That’s what the world sees.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“Life was for the living and death was for the dead, and there was enough beauty and grace in both to mend the most tender and broken.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“There was a right many folks in these mountains fought for the Union. So where’s them folks’ statue? Why ain’t their kin dancing around in uniforms playing dress-up and slapping stickers on the backs of their pickup trucks? Why ain’t they hung up on some little four-year window a hundred and fifty fucking years ago? Tell me that.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“What he’d feared was that moving forward would be a matter of forgetting, and if he forgot her it would be as if she’d never lived at all. But what he now realized was that there would never come a moment in his life when he would not remember. What he had truly forgotten was the simplicity that had made their life together so beautiful.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“When the days grow shallow, there are only the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we’ve loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us, and the voices we hear when we too come to pass.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“It had never been that addicts didn’t care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“How could she know what anyone truly believed if they wouldn’t come out and say it? How could she know what anyone was truly capable of? People like Cawthorn were the easy ones. But it was the ones we thought we knew, those were the ones who broke our hearts.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“A dog gets on a scent and there’s no turning back, and in that way dogs and men aren’t that different.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“No matter how strong a man was, there were moments in life that left him empty, things that could hollow his heart like a cavern in little more than an instant.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“Her hair was short and dyed black with blond streaks, a hairdo that all the girls were wearing but which made no sense to men who dodged skunks with their pickups nearly every time they drove.”
― David Joy, The Weight of This World

“If he ever wanted to move forward, if he ever wanted to be truly happy, he could not continue to dwell on what was. Happiness was not a passive thing. Joy so often required pursuit.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“That was the escapist cure for systemic poverty, the result of putting profit margins ahead of people for two hundred years. And when it all boiled down, that was the root cause of it all.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn