Hell's Half Acre Quotes

Multiple personalities. Don't freak out but I'm pretty sure I have them. Not a clinical thing, not a disease. But a distraction to be sure. There are maybe six or seven pretty concrete versions of myself knocking around in here and I mean it gets fucking crowded when everybody is drunk or talking at once.

I'm cold, Religiously cold.

Anything you can imagine is probably true. And the worst you can imagine is probably worth money.

Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.

The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.

The years tumble past you like bits of paper on the street and you may not even feel the breeze at your back but then something catches your eye, a twist of black hair or a dog leaping to catch a tennis ball. The splintered chorus of a stupid pop song. You turn around and another chunk of your life drifts by like unrecognized trash and it was never yours to begin with.

At an 1854 Fourth of July abolitionist rally in Framinhmgham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of both the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the court's decision to send Burns back to Virginia. He also lit on fire the US Constitution, calling it "a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.

And thank you for bringing me." "A pleasure." Bartel returned politely, and stole one last look at the incredible smiling Hairy. Rider stood. Though he was relieved to hear that she planned on staying for a while, he was glad for an excuse to escape his landlady's inquisition. "I'll give you a hand, Bartel." Just short of grabbing the older man's arm, he hustled him out the door. Once outside, bartel chortled jovially. "Ease up,son. She isn't coming after us." Rider exhaled deeply and grinned. "Who put the burr under the lady's saddle?" he asked as they approached the carriage. "Don't know, but she came flying into my store saying she had to get out here and get out here now! I tried to tell her I was too busy to be gallivanting all over hell's half acre, but do you think she'd listen? Uh-uh. Kept ranting and raving something 'bout Miss Willow's welfare. The woman was in a real dither all the way here." Rider groaned. Bartel slapped his back. "I can commiserate with you,son. There isn't anything scarier than a virtuous woman on a crusade.

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?

Monogamy doesn’t work unless it rises up from the bones. Because it promises nothing but fear and tension when forced on you. It fills you up with despair where there might be joy. It shoves guilt and paranoia and self-loathing down your throat, if you don’t truly want it.

I thought I loved her. But there was fear between us, truly.

In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare.

They could see the hills now; they were almost there—the long lift of the first pine ridge standing across half the horizon and beyond it a sense a feel of others, the mass of them seeming not so much to stand rush abruptly up out of the plateau as to hang suspended over it as his uncle had told him the Scottish highlands did except for this sharpness and color; that was two years ago, maybe three and his uncle had said, 'Which is why the people who chose by preference to live on them on little patches which wouldn't make eight bushels of corn or fifty pounds of lint cotton an acre even if they were not too steep for a mule to pull a plow across (but then they dont want to make the cotton anyway, only the corn and not too much of that because it really doesn't take a great deal of corn to run a still as big as one man and his sons want to fool with) are people named Gowrie and McCallum and Fraser and Ingrum that used to be Ingraham and Workitt that used to be Urquhart only the one that brought it to America and then Mississippi couldn’t spell it either, who love brawling and fear God and believe in Hell——' and it was as though his uncle had read his mind, holding the speedometer needle at fifty-five into the last mile of gravel (already the road was beginning to slant down toward the willow-and-cypress bottom of the Nine-Mile branch) speaking, that is volunteering to speak for the first time since they left town: 'Gowrie and Fraser and Workitt and Ingrum. And in the valleys along the rivers, the broad rich easy land where a man can raise something he can sell openly in daylight, the people named Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright——' and stopped, the car dropping on down the slope, increasing speed by its own weight; now he could see the bridge where Aleck Sander had waited for him in the dark and below which Highboy had smelled quicksand. 'We turn off just beyond it,' he said. 'I know,' his uncle said. '—And the ones named Sambo, they live in both, they elect both because they can stand either because they can stand anything.' The bridge was quite near now, the white railing of the entrance yawned rushing at them. 'Not all white people can endure slavery and apparently no man can stand freedom (Which incidentally—the premise that man really wants peace and freedom—is the trouble with our relations with Europe right now, whose people not only dont know what peace is but—except for Anglo Saxons—actively fear and distrust personal liberty; we are hoping without really any hope that our atom bomb will be enough to defend an idea as obsolete as Noah's Ark.); with one mutual instantaneous accord he forces his liberty into the hands of the first demagogue who rises into view: lacking that he himself destroys and obliterates it from his sight and ken and even remembrance with the frantic unanimity of a neighborhood stamping out a grass-fire. But the people named Sambo survived the one and who knows? they may even endure the other.

It is always necessary to look at sources in conjunction with one another, to understand who they were created by and for what purpose, to place them on the sliding scale of reliability.

Who even dreams up that kind of shit? What the bloody hell was the Unseelie king thinking when he created his royal caste? Did Death really have to be the death of anyone he fucked? Did the half-mad king sit around and cackle about that particular bit of nastiness? Did he even care? I suppose the original Death must have instinctively known how to mute his killing Sidhba-jai, or learned in time to control it, or simply hadn’t cared that he killed while slaking his needs. Then again, confined to the Unseelie prison, perhaps he never got to slake his needs, which would go a long way toward explaining how rabid the Unseelie princes were when the walls finally came tumbling down. I know I’d be mad as a hatter after three quarters of a million years of celibacy, whether hobbled by a Fae sex drive or an average dose of male testosterone. I wasted the rest of the day after Mac left, tamping down my raging desire to find the nearest willing woman and passing it, instead, with Kat and Sean, trying to teach the black Irish nephew of Dublin’s most notorious, deceased crime mobster, Rocky O’Bannion, what I’d learned about how to control our power. Sean and I walked the final paltry acres of grass in my kingdom, over and over, and bloody well over again, as I endeavored to instruct him on how to sense the earth beneath his boots and draw power from it without scorching the ground to charred ruin.

The work done, she lowered him back into place with what, in his final thought, seemed great gentleness. And then he was done.