The Wake of Forgiveness Quotes

“I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“You could rub a dry turd with a whole can of linseed oil, after all, and all you'd end up with was mess of shiny shit.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“The townsfolk would assume, from this day forward, that Klara's death had turned a gentle man bitter and hard, but the truth, Vaclav knew, was that her absence only rendered him, again, the man he'd been before he'd met her, one only her proximity had ever softened”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“She had a knack for numbers and negotiation, and once, when Karel had asked when she planned to settle down, Elizka Novotny had pulled a wisp of curls from the corner of her wet mouth and said, "I am settled. I didn't grow daddy's business just to marry some dirt farmer who expects me to hand over the reins so he can make a wreck of it.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Outside, floating sluggish over the southern fields, a stray cloud carried about its fringes a touch of color so that it appeared to Karel that the thing had made off with some of the unsuspecting sunset.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Ain’t a woman ever been paid enough for all that gets taken from her.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Not remembering ain’t the same as forgetting.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“He’d learned well enough that there were questions that revealed too much, that sometimes a question showed only that you knew less than you should.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“World is full up to the brim with worse and running down the sides with worser.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Fire was one of so many things that could render a man helpless, and now, as Karel reached the corral fence and circled around to the gate, his brothers’ eyes unblinking and tepid and fixed on him, he reckoned that family was another. A man couldn’t any more choose which one he was born into than he could will it to stay together when so many things abraded and raveled the fibers that were meant to keep it bound. Try to hold it all together with force, with a harness and a hard hand the way their father had, and it grew so thick with the cordage of resentment that you couldn’t even get your hands around it.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“He’s been inside this church so many times, on Sundays and holy days, for the yearly anniversary Mass of his mother’s death and for his own boyhood sacraments, but it has felt, on these occasions, like nothing more than an echoing and all-too-orderly indoor auction house, filled only with the improbable hopes of those who sit and kneel within, fashioning of their own desperation a god whose intercessions they rely upon for help amidst all the hardships for which they somehow hold him faultless.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“He’s seen enough of this, more than enough of his father and the animals he works toward his own ends, more than enough rainfall and wind. Still, though Graciela has wrung him dry of pride, he can’t say that he’s seen enough of her. He can’t say for sure that he ever will.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Then, what has only just bloomed within him curls brittle and brown at the edges, and he believes now, in the slow seconds of understanding, ephemeral as they ever are, that what lies behind a man in the expanding landscape of his past can never be left behind entirely, that even the blazing, cotton-flecked fields of the summer can’t sweat from him the hard, fallow crust of so many winters.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Here, with the ticking percussion of rain at work on the rooftop and the unmoving air of the stable cool and redolent of damp horsehair and dry hay, there is simply no way to watch this girl shedding her boots, pulling her camisole over her head, and to see her in terms of anything other than the startlingly novel and incomparable vision that she is.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“What he wants now, as he wanted then, is to take hold of her, to hide his eyes in the curve of her neck and feel her fingers in his hair, her arms around him, and in this way lay claim to the moment so that it cannot be taken from him.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“If she were reclined such that you could run a finger along the side of her body from ribs to thighs, it might put you in mind of a single, perfect valley found in a landscape of irregular, rolling foothills, of a horizon you’d gladly ride all day to reach.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“My father says that if we look for ourselves in others, we’re likely to find someone we don’t recognize.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“There’s something to be taken from this, he thinks. Something about the body, something about the eyes, about the flesh and the bones and the heart. About how they want to adjust, to heal, to see and feel. And they do, he thinks, if never entirely.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“How is it that anything ever gives rise to what it does instead of what it should?”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness

“Out there somewhere in the darkness, he knows, is a girl astride her black horse, the both of them streaming rainwater, and it is toward her that Karel rides out into the night, a failure on his father’s horse.”
― Bruce Machart, The Wake of Forgiveness