Blake Rutledge

“You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“I can summon no wonder for what lies between Dallas and Washington. The south is memories, memories — it cannot help believing that yesterday was better than tomorrow can possibly be. Some of the memories are extraordinarily well packaged, it is true, but when a place has been reduced in its own estimation no amount of artful packaging can hide the gloom.”
― Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas

“I remember her, grave with the peace of the destined, the summoned, and she seemed almost an apparition.
But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“But then, like all feelings, it passed.”
― Emma Cline, The Guest