Sheldon Compton > Sheldon's Quotes

“the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Brown pulled the bag closer to his side. He had nothing but good memories from his time overseas. That's the truth nobody knew. Since coming home he'd been labeled a baby-killer and a murderer, and things had been bad enough for him and his family when he went into the military.”
― Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle

“There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong.”
― Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle

“He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you.”
― Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle

“Tuck had always been made smaller made than Stan. Narrow shoulders, tiny hands and short fingers. Even as a young man his brown eyes were always watering like he'd been crying and his face never took hair well. What he had instead were four or five patches of hair that looked like a cluster of bee stingers popping straight out from his cheeks.”
― Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle

“The whole scene gave Ashley a fierce ache in the center of her chest. Everything her eyes came across spoke to how these two men lived in some kind of world where hardship was the constant, with only these tiny spaces between heartbeats offering some kind of peace. She saw an apartment that housed two men who lived whatever life they could in the confines of that small space because everything else was no good for anyone.”
― Sheldon Lee Compton, Brown Bottle

“He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Don’t forget to put wax in your ears; we are going to hunt poets’,”
― Alejandro Cordoba Sosa, TWO HUNDRED AND ONE MINIATURE TALES

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing.”
― Ron Carlson, Ron Carlson Writes a Story

“And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“HOLLYWOODING: Using all your years of deceiving others to put on a show at the table. Ever said, “Cute baby,” about some newborn who’d found a portal between their Hell Dimension and our world? You may have a career in poker.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

“Each thinking mind is a political mind.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good