Robin Kirk > Robin's Quotes

“The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual post-immigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede (a character). A guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm... This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. ... the tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy -- that is every man's tragedy.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“People always think there's this huge hundred-foot-high barrier that separates doing good from doing bad. But there's not. There's nothing. There's not even a little anthill. You just take one baby step in any direction and you're already there. You've doing something awful. And your life is changed forever.”
― Matt de la Pena, We Were Here

“145Perfection is for assholes”
― Taylor Mac

“Perfection is for assholes”
― Taylor Mac

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I'm an ice block with a racing heart. The commander wanted me to protect my friend. The commander wanted me to say no.”
― Robin Kirk, The Bond

“He’s a burly man with sparse white hair and a white beard who looks like Santa might look if Santa, in the off-season, carried a tackle box.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“THINKING BACK, IT is plain my mother knew what would happen. The human mind was open in those days, we felt every disturbance and ripple; even those like my brother were in tune with the natural laws. Man today lives in a coffin of flesh. Hearing and seeing nothing. The Land and Law are perverted. The Good Book says I will gather you to Jerusalem to the furnace of my wrath. It says thou art the land that is not cleansed. I concur. We need a great fire that will sweep from ocean to ocean and I offer my oath that I will soak myself in kerosene if promised the fire would be allowed to burn.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“The Comanche philosophy toward outsiders was nearly papal in its thoroughness: torture and kill the men, rape and kill the women, take the children for slaves or adoption. Few from the ancient countries of Europe took the Mexicans up on their offer.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It'll be a cold walk home past the shuttered-up shops on the high street, the sad, beery air meaning from Cromwell's, and out toward the river, its refreshing green scent and its movement a slithering in the darkness, to her flat, where she has left all the lights burning.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Nature doesn't know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball--aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“Manon wonders: did Gwyneth look into Colin's small, bloodshot eyes and say, "You are the UKIP-voting misogynist for me"?”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“When they'd spotted Rollo down the corridor at the police station in Huntingdon, both she and Ian felt the weak gratitude of the elderly.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“In body, perhaps, but not in spirit, Manon knows what lies beneath, how people can seem normal and yet grief swirls about like an unseen tide working against the currents of life, the mourner wrong-footed by its undertow. The bereaved should wear signs, she thinks, saying GRIEF IN PROGRESS--at least for a couple of years.”
― Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed

“When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed, but he made himself carry on and crossed to a neighbour’s house, whose light was on.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Driving up to the convent, the reflection of Furlong’s headlights crossed the windowpanes and it felt as though he was meeting himself there. Quietly as he could he drove past the front door and reversed down the side, to the coal shed, and turned the engine off. Sleepily, he climbed out and looked over the yews and hedges, the grotto with its statue of Our Lady, whose eyes were downcast as though she was disappointed by the artificial flowers at her feet, and the frost glittering in places where patches of light from the high windows fell.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Vomit, piss, blood, and unlikely amounts of semen pooled on almost every level surface, accompanied by lewd graffiti and knife marks gouging the walls, as well as various fist-sized holes, burns, acid scars, and other inexplicable damages if a convention of well-armed psychopaths had decided to distill their annual rampage into a single night.”
― Saad Z. Hossain, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday

“His body "was the corporeal archive of his pugnacious soul. The bullet [from a duel] caused him 'violent pain' on a regular basis, with bouts of blood gurgling into his mouth as well as probable poisoning from the ball leaking lead into his system. He could barely eat. Plagued by malaria and recurring bouts of typhoid, typhus and dysentery, his merciless battle wounds scarred his internal organs as much as his outward appearance. His teeth were painfully rotten...”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power