Hayden Gilbert > Recent Status Updates

“This may seem like contradictory counsel: to both accept the inevitability of change and attempt to remain constant. But to live well, sometimes you will need to hold two seemingly opposing truths, one in each hand, and carry them both comfortably.”

“I don’t think I could stand it if I had to go to war. I really couldn’t. It wouldn’t be too bad if they’d just take you out and shoot you or something…”

Dude is funny af lol

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move…Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“I wasn’t watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places and I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”

“A war comes always to someone else…And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either.”

“Then there’s your last dream gone.”
“Good riddance.”

“I remembered my grandfather, my sister, and various aunts and cousins, in their coffins and gone forever in the tombyards where the butterflies settled like flowers on the
graves and where the flowers blew away like butterflies over the stones.”

“It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”
“And memory.”
“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”

“Woodrow, quite a party,” Augustus said.

“Cherful in all weathers, never sherked a task. Splendid behaviour.”

“You don’t knot as much about women as you like to think you do,” Clara said. “You’re overrated in that regard.”
“By God, you’re sassy,” Augustus said.
Clara just smiled, her old beguiling smile. “I’m honest,” she said. “To most men, that’s sassy.”

Gus and Clara gotta be like my Top 1 favorite relationship.

“…P.S. Charles, I never hated you no matter what. I always loved you because you were my brother.”

‘“Where’s he going?” Roy Suggs asked, finding his voice at last.
“Gone to pick out a tree to hang you from, son,” Augustus said mildly.’

Ride with an outlaw, die with an outlaw.

‘Sometimes Po Campo sang in Spanish...The songs bothered some of the men, they were so sad.
"Po, you're a jolly fellow, how come you only sing about death?…
"I don't sing about myself," Campo said. "I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don't belong to me."
"Well, you sing them, who do they belong to?" Pea asked.
"They belong to those who hear them," Po said.’

“His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water trough at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.
He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.” 😭

As a devoted disciple of The Great American Miniseries of 1989 since I was a young boy, it’s about time I finally read The Great American Novel on which it is based.

As much as I love horror, the “broken family reunion” genre is hard to beat. Strong August: Osage County vibes that I’m really digging

Listening to one of my favorite actors read one of my favorite stories. Paul Giamatti’s narration on the new audiobook is fantastic

Traveling to Vermont today so I had to finally jump in this water

“In the rain,” he said. “It’s cold and miserable and I think I love you and I want to tell you a few things while we walk…”
“Umbrella?”
“No.”

"It's simply a better world if Bigfoot is real," Lynne S. McNeill, a folklorist at Utah State University, told me. "It says something positive about our wilderness spaces. It says we haven't totally destroyed our planet, that there are enough wild places left that a creature like Bigfoot can live undetected.”

“I’m 6, watching Josie and the Pussycats while eating Frute Brute on the floor of my grandpa’s trailer home; tree rings predict climate change; a man in a plaid shirt has lead in his diet, shits his britches, and his car blows up while crossing a scary bridge in Sandpoint, Idaho; somewhere, Charlie Manson is making that face…”

Honestly fairly interesting, just not what I’m in the mood for at the moment.

“This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old.”

Charles Grant is my comfort place

Not sure what Richard Ramirez has to do with the scary bridge from your hometown in Washington, but aight…

Listening to this on a roadtrip with my folks. My dad is getting more annoyed as it becomes apparent this book is going to be about capitalism instead of serial killers lol

“The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always.”

“I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east.”

Refreshingly unpretentious. This is a blast so far

These two are constantly getting shot with arrows after any sexual tension 😂