Heather > Heather's Quotes

“There were few places left on earth where large areas of habitat were wholly protected and mostly intact. Whenever and wherever the protections were lifted, these remnants were always destroyed. Couldn’t humans leave the few remaining tattered patches alone? Voracious. Most voracious predator on the planet.”
― Peter Heller, The Last Ranger

“Now in her mid-sixties, she had “common-lawed”—her words—old Ansel, who used to manage ranches in California and now spent most of his days rereading the Russians. Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin. Ren had once asked him why he loved them, as he himself found the going mostly too dour. “I don’t love them,” Ansel had said. “You don’t?” “Nothing worth serious study is lovable.”
― Peter Heller, The Last Ranger

“You know, a landscape, more than any other feature of a home, reflects the character of the owner.”
― Peter Heller, The Last Ranger

“To life,” she said. “One part wonder, three parts pain.”
― Peter Heller, The Last Ranger

“You know,” Hilly said, finally, “if the earth were a meritocracy and we were graded on how much each species contributed to the well-being of the whole, we’d be fucked. God would blow his whistle at all the people and yell, Everybody out of the pool!”
― Peter Heller, The Last Ranger

“Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“He was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he’d found Wren, a great, strong wind who’d supported his exploration of the sky”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“...he did not fear death but grief, the ache of being alone and mangled by change. Yet he was not ready to make peace with the end.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Will you let me stand beside you on your plot of earth? We'll tell the weeds to grow tall around our ankles, and when the wind gives us sycamore seeds, we'll raise them as sprouts, seedlings, saplings until they overpower, shade, and nurture us. Our trees will grow for two hand years or more as our union becomes even more unquestionable and strong.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“She missed the illusion of grass and sky kissing at the end of the world. She missed standing amid a rustling chorus of wind-waving grasses, the four horsemen of the tallgrass prairie--little bluestem, big bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass. She missed May fields dotted with black-eyed Susans, Indian blanket, and coreopsis. She missed bursts of red clay topsoil along dirt roads.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Plants were probably the most sentient of all living things: rational, bloodless bystanders, witnessing the great horror of it all.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart: A Love Story

“As Lewis held Wren's hands, he thought of her kindness, her intelligence, her inner beauty. Yet, just as he married these known qualities, he also married her vast unknowns. And she, his.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“We can't let the actions of a few hate-filled cowards change us. If we hide who we are to make others comfortable, we lose everything we're fighting for anyway.”
― Kate Pearsall, Bittersweet in the Hollow

“Love is worth fighting for. And if not for the bitter, we'd miss the magic of the sweet.”
― Kate Pearsall, Bittersweet in the Hollow

“Maybe it's innate in some of us to be drawn to the unknown, to both fear and desire it in equal parts.”
― Kate Pearsall, Bittersweet in the Hollow

“Mama is always doing stuff like that: fixing, mending, making the broken more beautiful than it had ever been before.”
― Kate Pearsall, Bittersweet in the Hollow

“Health itself appeared so bleak a state that sickness and death wrung little pity from him any more. Sometimes, when a patient’s final breaths seemed no more than the last turns of a wheel, leaving behind an object to be removed, charred, turned to ash, and stirred into a riverbed, his indifference terrified even him.”
― Vikram Paralkar, Night Theater

“The lack of gods in the clinic troubled her, though. In a place that people visited for fear of death there needed to be some source of hope.”
― Vikram Paralkar, Night Theater

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“A poet once wrote that the woods of Gallacia are as deep and dark as God’s sorrow, and while I am usually skeptical of poets, I feel this one may have been onto something.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“Blessed Virgin,” I whispered, even though I couldn’t even hear myself. “Why must you keep sending me innocent monsters?”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“Bors looked around the hunting lodge, the grounds, the stableyard. “It’s not the place’s fault,” he said reasonably. “It was here before she was. It doesn’t deserve to fall apart because something bad happened here.” Another of his long silences, and then he added, “Something bad happened to both of us, too. We don’t deserve to fall apart either.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“Unmarried women shouldn’t stay in a house full of men without a chaperone.” “I’m not exactly a man,” I protested. “As far as English propriety is concerned, a sworn soldier is not a respectable guardian of virtue.” “Well, they’ve got me there,” I said philosophically. “Respectable I am not.” (The English have no sworn soldiers, so far as I know. Hardly anyone does, outside of Gallacia.)”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“And before you say anything about Madeline Usher, she wasn’t a ghost. What happened in that house on the edge of the tarn was unspeakably awful, but there was nothing supernatural about it. Nature creates horrors enough all by itself.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“Tomorrow, in my experience, is only worth worrying about when there’s something you can do about it.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

“Some girls just don't know how to die.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you’re the one who starts it.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Don't Fear the Reaper

“He’s not following any of the rules, is he?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Don't Fear the Reaper