Ethan Regier

“Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.”
― Paulette Jiles, News of the World

“He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.”
― Paulette Jiles, News of the World

“I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.”
― Augustine of Hippo, City of God