Brande Baus

“Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

“Dani regained consciousness, holding 12-year-old Orla’s hand, in the year 1751. Charles was holding the girl’s wrist, but let go immediately. Dani held on. They were standing in a square in the middle of a crowd of several hundred people, in front of a gallows.”
― Steven Decker, Time Chain

“But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one of the houses—just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the face—and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.

The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to stay. She’ll stay there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to wherever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to be through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.

But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast, and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you felt is taken away from you, too.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men