Jewelweed Quotes

“Winnie would never be free of religious thinking, and she couldn't imagine ever wanting to be. She just needed a new schedule for her faith, one whose appointments with the divine were arranged not only through sermons, songs, and scripture, but rather on a walk-in basis with rocks, water, air, blood, space, and time.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“what I really want are thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind. Bring me books by women who have fallen out of step with society and refuse to march and sing the old songs. Books by men who through terrifying sacrifice overcome all the challenges set before them but one. Find me books by sensualists who drink their cups dry every time and yet never figure out why they’re so thirsty, and books by pious men and women who continue to believe that being good will save them. Bring me books about people in love, people so passionate about each other they will stand against family, community, country, fortune, and fame in order to be together, and books about people who don’t have a chance in hell yet somehow find one. Bring me books about the fear of God and the depths of nature, books about history, philosophy, psychology, science, and motorcycles.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“You show how much you love someone by being there for them when they need you, by knowing what they need and anticipating those needs.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“His psychic wounds presented a more complicated challenge. Something was needed in addition to the autonomic remedies provided by dreams, shaking, weeping, hollering, sweating, and vomiting. For true recovery -- involution -- Blake required satisfactory relations with other creatures over extended periods of time, and lots and lots of rest ... Blake could sometimes imagine what a reasonably balanced state of mind would be like. He could almost picture a less haunted edition of himself, sense an inheritance that might come due someday.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“Winnie trusted in the possibility of redemption. Life would not end in an apoplectic implosion of frustrated desires, foiled schemes, and defeated dreams, but rather in revealed glory.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed

“What good is freedom, Mrs. Helm, if you never do anything unusual or odd? That’s what freedom means—doing whatever you need to do so long as nobody else is hurt by it. That’s what you were talking about before, doing things that conflict with your sense of yourself in other rooms of your mind. You have to be able to do that or you’re not really alive.”
― David Rhodes, Jewelweed