William Romsek

“Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County. You will hunt it on the map, and it won't be there.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“One thing was certain. War was the craziest damfool madness that ever was. It was everything vile, absurd, brutal, murderous, confused. Mainly it was just confusion-bloody, stinking, noisy confusion with death as a casual by-product. How anyone ever won a battle, he couldn't imagine. This fight, which had no name and ought never to have a name, had been simply the result of two blind forces launched from vast confusion and colliding in vast confusion. What he had seen today was so incredibly evil and foolish that it baffled classification. No one man or idea was responsible for the evil. It was something in which men got trapped through a lack of foresight. All of them hated it while they were in it, and yet all had agreed to be in it.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the "Raintree County Atlas" is always fixed at nine o'clock, and it is summer and the days are long.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County

“Not one-not one single moment of time past can ever be got back. Not one little thing can escape change and death. Lost, the early Republic of our agrarian dream. We fought for it in battle and destroyed the thing we fought for. Lost, the years of our youth. They were good days and many, and they are all gone. And think of all the girls, John, the lovely girls, the lushloined girls who have gone down into the gulf of years.”
― Ross Lockridge Jr., Raintree County