Jon Nelson

“This started out as a story about my own fear, or rather about a time in my life when, because of an injury, I was not sure who I was, when I had to wait each night for a protean figure of my own creation to define me as something weak and loathsome and undeserving of breath. Instead, it became a story of others, people I discovered to be far more brave in their way than I am. And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos