Jerrod Langston

“He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been-a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that the Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“He tried to read at random, for his own pleasure and indulgence, many of the things that he had been waiting for years to read. But his mind would not be led where he wished it to go; his attention wandered from the pages he held before him, and more and more often he found himself staring dully in front of him, at nothing; it was as if from moment to moment his mind were emptied of all it knew and as if his will were drained of its strength. He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something-even pain-to pierce him, to bring him alive.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good the God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses