Jason Oliver

“Maybe not. But maybe yes. Ellen, the older I get, the more convinced I am that every hurt the world has ever known is somehow the fault of every person who ever lived. Maybe not directly and never entirely, but somehow, I fear, we own all of the world’s hurts together.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“She understood the difference between a "troubled mind" and "troublemaker”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper - a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting - is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments? What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the "minute particulars" of our lives?”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Scars bear testimony to occupation, to event, but not to circumstances; to phenomena but not conditions. They are evidence only, not details. In which direction was he walking? Were the soles of his boots intact? Was the knife fresh-sharpened? What did he witness? I want to know more than the fact that my grandfather was in the Altamaha floodplain in 1928... Scars turn into trinkets you keep.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood