Plainsong Quotes

“A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“You don't deserve it, he said aloud. Don't ever begin to think that you do.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“The evening wasn’t cold yet... But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don't amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?

I can't say, Raymond said. But I'm going to. That's what I know.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“You're not talking to her, Maggie Jones said. You and Raymond don't talk like you should to that girl. Women want to hear some conversation in the evening. We don't think that's too much to ask. We're willing to put up with a lot from you men, but in the evening we want to hear some talking. We want to have a little conversation in the house.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“The shaggy saddle horses, already winter-coated, stood with their backs to the wind, watching the two men in the corral, the horses’ tails blowing out, their breath snorted out in white plumes and carried away in tatters by the wind.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Then it was nighttime. The boys lay in bed together upstairs in the old sleeping porch, with one of the windows opened slightly to the quiet air, and once in the night while their father slept they were quite certain that out in the big pasture northwest of the house they could hear dogs fighting and howling. They got up and looked out the windows. There wasn’t anything to see though. There were just the familiar high white stars and the dark trees and space.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Afterward, when she was calm again, after the doctor had left, she went into the air outside the Holt County Clinic next to the hospital, and the light in the street seemed sharp to her and hard-edged, definite, as if it were no longer merely a late fall afternoon in the hour before dusk, but instead as if it were the first moment of noon in the exact meridian of summer and she was standing precisely under the full illumination of the sun.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“He took the baby in her white hospital blankets and looked at her, holding her fearfully out in front of his face like a piece of rigid but delicate kitchen crockery.
My goodness, he said after a minute. The baby's eyes looked up at him without blinking. Well, my my. My lord almighty.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“He should of taken it last year.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong