2025-04-28 22:28:17
He knew bird tunes the way people know who’s on the radio.
2025-05-01 22:38:04
You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.
2025-05-07 22:25:42
Finally he said, “Diamond. He’s bright and shiny and worth a lot. Harder than anything else there is.”
2025-05-20 22:29:01
Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.
2025-05-21 22:50:29
Here’s where Miss Barks didn’t grow up: foster care. She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what’s doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.
2025-05-23 23:32:38
The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.
2025-05-28 22:12:00
And I said something to the effect of, Lady, you got that one fucking right.
2025-06-13 22:35:33
He said fishing was something he did to clear his head. Sitting with his dogs at the water’s edge listening to the birds and frogs all singing their praises, he felt right close to God.
2025-07-03 22:19:44
“I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to hear it. A successful team is not made of leaders. It is made of followers.”
2025-07-05 22:48:35
But I never forgot what Coach said: a team is made of followers.
2025-07-08 21:29:17
in 35
2025-07-08 21:44:59
My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive.
2025-07-12 22:03:56
Oh, I said thank you. All the time. To Mattie Kate for feeding me, to Angus for driving me places, to Coach for every freaking thing. Saying thanks, but at the same time thinking, where can I hide my dope, how can I get out of doing all this homework, who is he to tell me I can’t go riding around with my friends on a Saturday night, I’m not a damn child.
2025-07-15 21:59:02
My eyes had made friends with the dark and I could see all of her now:
2025-07-22 22:21:58
Fast Forward had connections in a city he said was on the way, somebody that could hook him up with easy cash, and that was enough for four people high on youth and extreme inexperience.
2025-07-29 20:27:24
Her surprising knowledge of firearms made that sentence way too disturbing.
2025-07-30 22:00:07
told him to quit torturing himself, but he was as hooked on his poison as I was on mine
2025-07-31 20:35:56
“Whatever you love about her, you get to live with. And the other stuff, you live with that too.” Angus was this Yoda individual. It was probably good you talked to her, even if it wasn’t.
2025-07-31 20:44:24
“Nobody else is going to tell you this. But art is work. People get paid to do exactly what you’re doing. Guys a lot older than you, with less skill and very tired narratives.” I told her thanks, but my little strip was small potatoes. Who outside of here would give a rat’s ass about the superhero that stayed in Smallville? She said, Don’t be so sure. There’s us, there’s West Virginia and Kentucky. And Tennessee. We aren’t any potatoes at all, small or large. She said if I was so keen to be a grown man, I should quit thinking like a potato.
2025-07-31 20:48:35
Part of being a mature person is knowing your skill set, and neither of us had talents for larceny.
2025-07-31 22:06:46
They were crazy about each other though. You could see it plain as day in how they helped each other out, like mind reading. Mr. Peg would say, Like a mule team in harness.
2025-07-31 22:09:46
Miss Annie said they loved what was good about this place, and had each other’s backs for the rest, and that was enough. “One other person can go a long way towards making your world right,” she said, “but the support has to run both ways.”
2025-07-31 22:26:27
’m saying, he could spend hours on that terminal, reading or writing either one. I asked how they came up with so much to say. He said they told each other everything they cared about, everything that got them sad, and what all made them happiest. That was about it. He said between those three, they could probably keep going till the end of time. If not, they’d come up with another category.
2025-07-31 22:36:39
We drove through the creepy stretch where the kudzu vines are hanging off the trees and reaching over the guardrails like they’re wanting to get at you.
2025-07-31 23:00:03
She dropped her naked potatoes in the water to boil, wiped her hands on her apron, and used them to push her hair back from her forehead, one of those little habits that ran right down the Peggot generations.
2025-08-01 22:25:18
know you love her. I’m not being hateful.” She shook her head, looking up at the trees. “It’s why I couldn’t be with Hammer Kelly. He’s that same kind of good like you are. Like there’s some metal or something in you that won’t melt down, no matter what.” “Oh, I melt down. I could show you some fine broken shit.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’m saying you wake up and you’re still yourself, every day. I’m not like that, I give in. I change my recipe, to suit people.”
2025-08-02 14:36:35
Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
2025-08-03 18:03:39
Whatever happened down there had knocked the shine off Emmy, maybe forever.
2025-08-03 22:11:08
’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.
2025-08-03 22:17:28
The entertainments of sober living are all those best things in life that are said to be free. Breathing, sleeping, enjoying your newly regularized bowels. Eating your own bad cooking.
2025-08-03 22:22:17
Like most of Mr. McCobb’s, it made no money whatsoever for the first year. Unlike him, I stuck to it.
2025-08-03 22:24:57
She was there on scholarship, and hadn’t understood she was going to be fraternizing with, as she put it, cake eaters and princes of capitalism.