Rivers Quotes

“Tomorrow you and them will set out for the end of your lives and I’ll be here. The one who gave and would keep on giving if you’d let me. But you don’t want to let me. You and them are going to walk through the valley but you’ll have no shepherd. You’ll have no answers. And you’ll kill the babies. And you’ll die. You ain’t no healer, no more than I am, but I can give more than you.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“And it was then that Cohen began to feel the weight of the others in this house on this dot on the map below the Line. He had always been aware that he wasn't the only one who had lost, but the losses for others seemed different to him, more true and exact, now that the losses of others had eyes and faces and arms and legs.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn’t rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“SOMEWHERE ELSE. NO COUNTRYSIDE. NO beach. No pastures or barbed wire or crepe myrtles. A concrete world where he walked down a city street on a normal day with normal people up and down the sidewalks and in and out of the stores. Looking at the street signs but in a language that he didn’t understand and there was nothing distinct about this place. He walked on, looking into store windows, stepping into bars and looking around the tables, stopping at a pay phone and dialing and then ringing and ringing and no answer and hanging up and walking on. Newspaper stands and vendors selling hot dogs and a woman in a tight silver dress smoking a cigarette in front of a dress shop. A dog without a collar sniffing at a garbage can. The random honk of a car horn and he walked on, looking in the windows, looking at himself in the reflection”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“I know what you’re walking around with. Got the rooms boarded up like you can lock the ghosts away but they only seep under the doors. Seep between the cracks in the walls and live right there with you. I saw your place. Saw what you tried boarding up.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“Men down here aren’t like the men you think of,” he said. “Men down here will probably hurt a bunch of women before they’ll hurt anything else. I don’t figure nobody ever hurt anything without knowing they could hurt it first. That’s the way it is and probably the way it’s always been.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“The Line don’t do nothing but point fingers,” the man continued. He sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded. “It tells us some people are all right. Some people ain’t.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers

“She fell asleep quickly then, as if what she had to say emptied her, and afterward he would lie there and listen to the music and the voices coming from the square below, the yelling and the breaking bottles and the wild laughter, and he wondered if this was what we would all become if given the opportunity. If what they had seen below would ultimately win when it was all broken down. He imagined a world where there was nothing to rule but man’s own instinct and desire and wondered would that make us better or worse.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Rivers