Black River Orchard Quotes

“Maybe the lies you told yourself became true enough, eventually. Like a magic spell. An incantation of deception; an illusion made real.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“It is not for the artist to explain his art; it exists as its own justification.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“(Head’s up: Apples contain a lot of fiber, do not eat a shitload of them in one go. Because shitload becomes literal, not metaphorical.)”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“A knock on the door when you were not expecting one felt to Emily like literal violence. People who just…showed up at your house? Completely unnerving. It was an older-generation thing, she knew, to simply “pop by” unannounced. But her generation didn’t even like to take or make phone calls, thank you, much less answer the door for a total fucking stranger.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“this was the real quicksand. Debt drew you down deeper and deeper, held you firm, so you never, ever got out no matter how hard you tried. Trickle-down economics? Yeah, right. Only thing that trickled down was that debt. Like piss on your head. And it would run down onto Calla, too. Her last year of high school started next week, and then what? College? At this rate, she’d need a full ride or have to take on predatory student loans for the rest of her life. Debt spackled upon debt, upon debt, upon debt: all mortar, no brick.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“(Dessert was pecan pie, always and forever, because pumpkin pie was a garbage pie you wouldn’t eat any other day of the year.)”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Not an excuse. Just reality. You cut down education, put lead and other nasty business in the water, feed them a diet of poisonous pig-crap on the television and the internet, those are cracks. They widen. People fall through. They get mean and they get crazy. And they go blind down there in the darkness.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Emily was hydrophobic. Not so bad she couldn’t stand here, but enough that she felt the river’s hungry waters easing past like a starving crocodile with black, dead eyes.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Life carried forward. Decay and rejuvenation. Pain and grace locked in a whirling dance, the blur of red and green. Beauty and horror. Fuck around, find out. Everything cut down to nothing. But nothing becomes everything, too, on a long enough timeline, because that’s the way of things.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Every apple hanging from every one of the Ruby Slipper trees hung full and dark like a bead of blood from a cut finger.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“The road to old age was marked by many signposts and billboards, but none more dramatic than the one that warned you that the bridge was out ahead, and yet you kept driving toward it, because what else could you do? The road was the road and you couldn't stop now.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“A rare day when Jersey is the side you want to be on,”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“The morning was crisp like a cold, raw carrot—it had a bite to it.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Peace was the nothingness, the void of everything, the great empty. He just had to find that place. Dive into it like a black cave. You had to fall past despair and doubt to get there. But once you did, you gave yourself to it, found solace in the oblivion.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“You're gone and I miss you. You were a good friend even when you weren't and I hope the same could be said of me to you. We should have forgiven each other for things we said, for the way we both were.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Winter was a time of long shadows gathering, like vultures shuffling together on the long branch of a leafless tree. Waiting for their moment.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“But then winter did what winter did: It grew darker, colder, crueler. In this case, wetter, too. Rain and ice more than snow. The wind was often biting. The skies, gray as a river-soaked corpse.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Emily took a good long look at John. The kids who came to the shelter she worked at in Philly had put on all this armor, all of it not just to protect them, but to hide what they were feeling. (Which, she supposed, was itself a kind of protection.)”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Cherie asks if John met true evil there. If he saw the face of it. He says to her, “I did, I think. True evil is real. But it’s still a human evil. Even if it comes from outside of us, I think at the end of the day, it only wins when we let it in.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“I should break you,” Meg said. “You already did. Again and again. You broke me.” Meg laughed—but it was a sad, wretched laugh. “I didn’t, though. I almost did. But here you are. Still Emily. Still defiant. Still unabashedly you. I wanted you different. I wanted you like me.” “That was always your problem, wasn’t it?”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“What is this? You here to kill me?” “You know, I want that, I really do, but I’ve made a choice with my life and that choice is walking a path of trying my damnedest not to hurt other people. Not on purpose, at least. Not directly.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“There came a moment in every kid’s life when they realized their parents were, at best, completely inadequate and unprepared, and at worst, they were narcissistic abusers who had wrapped their children in a tangled skein of trauma and anxiety like spiders securing food in a web.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“John was her rock. John knew what to do. He felt like the thing you held on to in a storm so it didn’t sweep you away—and if he was getting swept away and she was holding on to him?”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“For me, the light is always the answer, and that’s vague, I know, but it’s meant to be. Because the light comes in a lot of forms.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Quakers tend to recognize nuance here, John, in that we are rarely one thing or the other. We are not all good or all bad. We’re a mix of those things, and all we can try to do is to banish the darkness inside us with the light of justice. It’s clichéd, but sometimes we need the darkness to see the light. Some understand that darkness as a natural process.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“So that act was evil.” “I believe it was.” “And are you evil for having committed the act?” “I—” This was one of the questions that literally kept him up some nights. A question chasing him like a pack of wolves. “I suspect I must be.” “And yet, evil men don’t usually worry about whether or not they’re evil, or what to do about evil. They just…be evil.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“If you wanna know what’s wrong, you gotta talk to the trees.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“Dan, and I say this as your friend, what the everloving fuck.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“And now here she stood in the kitchen, with another boss at her back—this time, Meg’s mother, lording over her, sneering at her fucking vinaigrette. It made her angry and sad. She felt caught between those two feelings. And it made her unsure what to do next, or if she even had any moves to make.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard

“It made her angry and sad. She felt caught between those two feelings. And it made her unsure what to do next, or if she even had any moves to make.”
― Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard