Karen C.

“seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety—the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful—and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she’d once been and the young boy who’d stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay— everything she saw and anticipated remembering—onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Lonesomeness swept over him. He didn’t want to disappear from his family’s life, their memories, their pictures of him in their heads, didn’t want them to forget him, look at these old portraits decades on, his sisters showing them to their grandkids, saying, This is my brother; he gave this to me the last time I saw him; I never knew what happened to him, if he’s still alive somewhere or died in a war or had a family or lived alone.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Ethan thought, These carbon sisters on my drawing will always be in the carbon water, crossing the carbon channel, beneath a carbon sun, watched from above by people of bones and blood and muscle and mind. He rubbed the hatched water behind the two figures in the drawing and two carbon shadows appeared projected behind them on the carbon water, of carbon girls and the carbon baskets filled with the carbon berries they held above her heads. What kind of world would that be, in which a shadow was composed of the same stuff as the girl who cast it, and the blueberries she ate the same stuff as she? What if when I stood, my shadow was flesh and blood? What if berries were flesh and they grew on branches of arteries pulsing with blood and decked with leaves of skin?”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Pictures of what you really see.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden