“Don't leave me stranded in a sea of discontent.”
“I sat in the back with Omar napping against my right shoulder and Mother napping against my left, and I thumbed through the bird book and looked at pictures of all the new birds I had seen, and at the ones I had not seen. It was unimaginable to think that they were out there-all these hundreds, even thousands of birds-and that I had not seen them. I felt both hungry and sated-like a cat, I imagined. With Mother asleep on my shoulder, good crisp air coming in the window, a stomach full of flounder, and two dozen new birds flying through my mind-and returning home-I felt like there couldn't be a more satisfied person in the world.
This, in turn, made me hungrier: made me want to see more.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I imagined they had been listening for me, but still had not heard me drive up, which made me realize how old they really were: Grandfather, old beyond his time, and Father, old before his time.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that's a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“I don't look for love. Love looks for me." "Why?" "Because it needs me. Because I'm not afraid of it.”
“Did he know he was going to die?" I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise-his little granddaughter again.
"He was eight-seven," he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both-the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy's.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“...I don't want you think that we ain't a family 'cause we ain't all in one place....”
Source: Finding Freedom
“I remember a game Omar and I used to play, when we were small. Scorpions would glow in the dark, after we'd loaded them up with light by shining our flashlight on them. Not every scorpion would glow like this, but some would-about one in a hundred, maybe one in a thousand. We'd lift up rocks, under the moonlight, and shine our lights on the scorpions' backs, looking for such a specimen. And then when we'd find one, we'd fill him with the light from our flashlights, then shut the lights off and follow him, glowing in the dark, across the caliche streambeds, across the slick rock, and across the hills, following him until the glimmer faded, and there was only silence.”
Source: The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness: Three Lyrical Short Stories of Texas, Appalachia, and the Untamed American West
“His family fell upon him in a crush of hugs and celebration.”
Source: Hidden Figures (Book only)
“Brand said, fiercely, in a breaking voice, "You're my boy. You can do anything. Anything.”
Source: The Hanged Man