“I also spent a little time ruminating on the idea of a "friend" - was friendship a state activated only by proximity, or was it mostly a thought you carried around with you, like a belief in God or an optimistic disposition, that helped with daily existence?”
Source: UnWorld
“We carved our names on olive bark, believing wood was stronger than war. But bombs fell heavier than promises, and silence grew roots deeper than trees.”
Source: The Name Beneath the Dust: The Complete Novella: "The Strongest Stories Don’t Shout. They Whisper Beneath the Dust."
“Some stories aren’t told directly, because they live better in silence.”
Source: The Name Beneath the Dust: The Complete Novella: "The Strongest Stories Don’t Shout. They Whisper Beneath the Dust."
“In the dust of war, what remains is not the ruins, but the names we whispered and the promises we broke.”
Source: The Name Beneath the Dust: The Complete Novella: "The Strongest Stories Don’t Shout. They Whisper Beneath the Dust."
“In the final image, he is sitting atop the horse. We have not witnessed a victory or a conquering, but a love scene, a man who knows innately how connection happens, how we traverse emotional distance, how we calm one another's fears.
Similarly, toward the end of the film, Brady goes to visit Lane. He is wearing his cowboy hat, green rodeo shirt, jeans, and a bandanna tied around his neck as if he's ready to go riding. With the help of the nurses at the rehab facility, he dresses Lane in boots, jeans, and his old maroon-striped rodeo shirt. Brady puts Lane's cowboy hat atop his head: "We don't want you to get a sunburn," he says. With great difficulty, they ease Lane over a saddle propped up on parallel bars. Brady holds the reins as if he is the horse and takes Lane riding again.
"You're loping off into the distance," he says as Lane struggles to stay upright. Lane's head falls and Brady cajoles it back up with the patience of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike.
Together they are in a rehab facility loping, smiling, tilting, riding, Brady talking softly, lovingly. Brady's man talk soothes me. I have been the horse and I have been Lane, broken through a transition, learning to allow my body to feel pressure, to be cajoled to walk two steps forward, to trust someone enough to help me imagine what it would be like to lope along in my cowboy hat protecting me from sunburn, to learn what it means to talk like a man.”
Source: Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
“How can a woman be Law-Struck for real unless she remains
Law-Struck Still.”
Source: Law Struck Still
“Hal and Mr. Dart exchanged glances, quite as if they had years of friendship behind them, and for a moment my heart rejoiced in the rightness of the moment.”
Source: Bee Sting Cake
“You can be at ease only with those people to whom you can say any damn fool thing that comes into your head, knowing they will respond in kind, and knowing that any misunderstandings will be thrashed out right now, rather than buried deep and given a chance to fester.”
“There is no true friendship unless You weld it between souls that cling together by the charity poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
Source: Confessions
“She doesn’t ask what broke me.
She just shows up
A mug of coffee in one hand,
a wilted orchid in the other.
The purple matches the bruise of the sky,
sun bleeding out behind the hills.
We sit with silence between us.
She lets mine grow wild.
Pours warmth into it without stirring.
When I finally say “it still hurts,”
she doesn’t say it’ll stop.
She just shifts closer,
like grief is a door she knows how to hold open
without letting anything spill.
The orchid rests between us on the table.
One petal falls.
She catches it.
Says, “even the softest things
learn how to let go.”
And I believe her.”
Source: A Shelf of Things I Never Said