Rose's Garden Quotes

“So that’s all right then, isn’t it?” she said. “If you can’t go there with them, the best you can do is to be there when they get back.” She reached over and touched his cheek. “We all suffer something, don’t we?” she said. “Some of us just go down harder than others.”
― Carrie Brown, Rose's Garden: A Novel

“And each time she did, he would cry the way he had cried at his wife’s funeral, understanding at last that grief is not accountable, that it lives wherever it chooses, and that the worst thing is this: after the first time, one always has the memory of it.”
― Carrie Brown, Rose's Garden: A Novel

“And that the waters had receded in less than two days, a breathtaking reversal, leaving the town choked with rust and mud, seemed to him a perfect demonstration of the brutality of destruction—it can all happen in a second, he had thought; they might not even have known it was coming.”
― Carrie Brown, Rose's Garden: A Novel

“What he wanted, at that moment, was to be done with the encumbrances of his life. He wanted to lay all his belongings down in a circle around himself—all his worldly goods. He wanted to see the material evidence of his life scavenged by the crows and the woodpeckers, the foxes and the narrow, bald-faced possum—his watch jerked across the ground by a phalanx of field mice, its gold face disappearing, winking, into the shadowy ferns; his money clip grasped by a darting mockingbird, who would fly away with it to a distant tree, screaming in pleasure. He wanted to see the buttons plucked from his shirts, the threads unwound from his jacket. He wanted to be unraveled, to do away with what felt like the poisoned substance of himself, the burden of his own oppression”
― Carrie Brown, Rose's Garden: A Novel