Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by William Gay

Quote by William Gay

“I was changing, and it scared me, for I wanted to be a child always, and I did not want Dug to grow up. I wanted it to always be brittle cold November and both of us working there in that field, with birds flying and calling lonesome far above, and looking forward to how good the fire would feel at the end of the day. But that kind of thing can never be, and that is what hurt me like a knife.”

Quote by William Gay

Work

Stories from the Attic

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

William Gay

Browse famous quotes and profile details for William Gay. more

You May Also Like

“Winds are changing,” Wit whispered. Dalinar glanced at him. Wit’s eyes narrowed, and he scanned the night sky. “It’s been happening for months now. A whirlwind. Shifting and churning, blowing us round and around. Like a world spinning, but we can’t see it because we’re too much a part of it.” “World spinning. What foolishness is this?” “The foolishness of men who care, Dalinar,” Wit said. “And the brilliance of those who do not. The second depend on the first—but also exploit the first—while the first misunderstand the second, hoping that the second are more like the first. And all of their games steal our time. Second by second.”

“My former attitude was the luxury of a sheltered child who got to his twenties without ever doubting the stability (and, smugly, I know, the superiority) of his country, without disaster. As it did to so many of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should have broken well before. It seems impossible to me that people who weren't alive then will soon be getting their driver's licenses. When I zoom out, much of this country's history since that day seems a fitful, graceless descent to overseas violence and domestic paranoia. Terrorism works.”

“We had accomplished what we could on the small stage of the university; whatever marks we left behind were like "the corpses of angels" in Forché's poem, fleeting and ephemeral impressions on the snowy field of history. We thought we had made a difference, or could. We believed we knew where we were going. Some of us were even right.”

“Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.”