The Solace of Leaving Early Quotes

“Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin? ”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“...he said almost nothing, and ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: God is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all God can do is take into God's self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one godlike gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty, and goodness...the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is...Say yes.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“But you can't ever live in the place you dream about, the town you long for. ...the moment you become conscious of your desire, and then fulfill it, it evaporates.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling, animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom?”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began...She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him―that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early

“Amos watched her, struck again by how exquisite the stories were the people around him carried, and mostly silently, the lives they’d lived and endured, the sweetness and loss.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“I looked at you to tell me what it meant, but you just stared straight ahead, your jaw clenched. Nothing had ever scared me more, not the swirl of blue feathers in the road, not the fact of the bird, but that look on your face, Taos, as though you were collecting evidence against the world and here was an exhibit. It’s what we do, Epiphany does it too, the younger, the lesser, the least qualified, looking to the elder, the bitter straight and smarter one, to tell us, just in case—just in case we’re the only ones left someday—precisely what the fuck we’re supposed to think.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“They named you Taos because that’s where they went on their honeymoon, and there was something in it, something beyond the sentimental or nostalgic, they were trying to say: once we went so far. And you were how far they went. There is no more distant star, I now believe.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It’s just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“All I wanted was to live the life of the mind, and I know it’s a terribly shopworn thing to say, but there you have it. I didn’t stand in any camp, I wasn’t a formalist or a feminist, I didn’t want to call myself a reader-response person or a deconstructionist or a poststructuralist. I wasn’t a Marxist or a proponent of queer theory, or a Freudian, a post colonialist, or God help us! there was a black man in our department, a graduate student like me, who wanted us to start a movement to rename Multiculturalism ‘Slave Studies.’ He believed there was some sort of cleansing, revolutionary power in the ‘ironic distancing,’ that’s what he called it.” Langston took a deep breath, then sighed, remembering it all. “And no one could say anything to him, because we had no authority—that’s the key to the recent developments in the critical tradition: if you’re inside—and believe me, academia is nothing but a cult of expertise, it is the only religion alive and well—only if you’re inside do you have any authority, and if that’s the case, no one can speak to you. Your curriculum vitae becomes your fortress.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“A story about grief is actually a story about what is possible, multiple universes, up against the finite, or what happens when, as Tillich says, the infinitely removed makes itself felt.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“grief splinters, Taos, it splits off into fragments (I think nostalgia does this, too, nostalgia being a very specific manifestation of grief), and that each of those fragments then has a life of its own. Every day is a new way to grieve,”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“I’m going to fire her, he thought, and I’m going to hear her voice one more time, and he picked up the telephone, dialing so fast and hard he missed the third number and had to start over.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Her father was patting her back, too, and she turned and looked at him, and oh my, what a hard man he was to see. Between his handsome silence and the way he always seemed to be leaving a room, Langston often felt like a phantom fathered her. And then—those times he did come clearly into focus—he arrived like a lightning bolt: the way he was aging (what if she lost him?), the steep toll of the past everywhere evident on him, the bargains he’d made, his patient, plodding love.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Langston studied her notes carefully. She tapped her pencil on the table. She rubbed Germane’s fur with her feet. The whole poem was right there in front of her. She had done the architectural work flawlessly, she felt. So where was the poem? What labor had she not performed? Perhaps she needed to do more reading . . . perhaps she needed to study with more breadth the phenomenon of narcissism. She made a note to herself to look into a diagnostic manual the next time she visited the public library in Hopwood.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Finitude,” he wrote, “is the contradiction of the infinite, or anything which is subject to the laws of entropy, decay, and extinction. And for us, for human beings, I would include in the definition a consciousness of the perishing of each moment of existence. Or, more simply: the de-mand made upon us, as a species, at every moment, to choose one thing instead of another. We might imagine that we are on a boat, and that the prow of the boat penetrating the water is the choice made, or the present thing, and that the wake following the boat is what is not chosen, the absent thing: tiny wave upon wave, a body growing wider and wider, finally dissolving into the universe in ways we cannot fully perceive. What is present is finite; what is absent is infinite.” He crossed it out.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“I’ve come to believe the marriage vows should include, in the ‘Will you love him, honor him, etc.’ section, a simple question: ‘Will you love him when he stands in the way of your heart’s deepest desire?’ or ‘Will you love him when the fact of him absolutely ruins your joy?’ Something like that.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“there are so many ways to go—an infinite number of ways to go as we spiral out from our genesis. Some fight against any measure of grace, and some decide to sit very still at the table and linger. Some stand right inside their impossible weight, tug at the edge of a blouse. Fuchsia. However did people manage?”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“That was the strangest thing about weddings, from Amos’s point of view, that they pretended to be sacred occasions but in fact had no meaning. Because a marriage isn’t a marriage until it’s over, he thought, until the couple looked back, years later, at the moment they wed and said, “Oh, that’s what really happened that day.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Remember the words of the Gnostic Jesus, I forget which book: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ ” “It was Thomas.” “Yes, the Book of Thomas.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“There were many theories, some erudite and some homespun, about how one arrived at a position of faith, but for Langston there was only one: Kierkegaard’s. The Leap. Kierkegaard’s infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity eliminated the possibility of a gradual approach. The leap of faith was an existential act that contained in its very execution, perhaps, an apprehension of eternity? Langston wondered. She tried to consider the other approach, the way it might happen in a life that one could spend years weaving toward a miracle, moving forward then dropping away with a little sideways feint, as if being watched by a man-eating beast, and how finally, with just a few steps to go, one would leap into the jaws and be changed forever. Sola fide, Luther said. The question of faith plagued her because literature was her religion, and she was curious about the reader’s relationship to a text. It struck her that we come to texts in the same way we come to God, either as leapers or tremblers,”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“One is either perfectly present and entirely innocent of one’s own contentment (which is remarkably like not being content) or one is aware, and thus distanced, and no longer at home or happy. Am I wrong?”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“But you can’t ever live in the place you dream about, the town you long for. You can’t go there, and I don’t mean like Thomas Wolfe or whatever, I mean the moment you become conscious of your desire, and then fulfill it, it evaporates.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“When she first left for college I told Walt, could you hand me a napkin, Amos? she’d be back within the year, and there were some touch-and-go moments, but mostly she just breezed right through.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“There were, in fact, countless things he appreciated about AnnaLee. He liked her wildness, the way she carried herself like a great ship through the world; her grief, and her great mind; the way she listened in church, her strange vulnerability to her mother. She had a resilient, perfectly normal marriage, she was afraid to drive, and she dreamed primarily in smells. She interested him.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Alice wasn’t beautiful, not really, but she was conscious. She took in the whole world at a glance, and in doing so, drew the world to her.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“He was leading up to his favorite Christological position, which is that everything recognizable is inverted in the Christ-event: the strong are made weak, the prostitute is invited to the table, the Law is replaced with the Spirit, the sacrificial animals are set free. Christ’s task is immediacy, he doesn’t have time for anything but metaphor, he doesn’t have time for actual cows, to literally sacrifice is demonic (or as Tillich would say, to literalize any event in the myth of Jesus is idolatry).”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Langston, don’t you know how Alice died? Where have you been? What goes on with you that you are so completely free of anyone else’s story? My God.”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“Haddington was a destination no respectable writer would choose as the fate of a character; it lacked the power of the tenement, the beauty of the gothic ruin, the geometry of the heartless city. She wondered if she were about to become one of them:”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel

“How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself?”
― Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early: A Novel