Life, and Death, and Giants Quotes

“Sometimes, it isn’t where you’re going, but rather what you’re running from that determines where you find yourself.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“If love was all the same water, perhaps it lapped a bit differently on each shore that it touched? Or perhaps it shaped itself to the depth and breadth of the vessels that contained it? Enjoy what you have, Thomas wrote. Enjoy every minute of it. Youth is a seemingly bottomless gift, but it has a short shelf life.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“The last night they’d spoken”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“I must begin by recognizing the short, remarkable life of Robert Pershing Wadlow (February 22, 1918–July 15, 1940), the tallest person who ever lived. Just eight pounds five ounces at birth, Wadlow stood eight feet 11.1 inches tall, weighed 439 pounds, and had size 37 feet at the time of his death, at age twenty-two, his extraordinary growth driven by hypertrophy of the pituitary gland. For a time, Wadlow toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus and promoted shoes for the International Shoe Company, but he seems to have sought a normal life, resisting efforts to define him exclusively as a circus attraction. He died of an infection in Manistee, Michigan, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Alton, Illinois.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“The last night they’d spoken, she told him everyone takes two journeys alone, the one that brings us to Earth and the one that takes us to heaven, and it is the path we have trod in between that gives the measure of a life. It is the good we leave behind us, she said, that makes a life worth living.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“all zealous belief, secular and spiritual, relies upon some blindness in the believers. Only in the brokenness of true humility can we see beyond the false borders we ourselves, saints and sinners alike, erect. Thomas, an agnostic who has done more for God’s creatures than perhaps any random hundred believers together, puts it more simply. Life, he says, is complicated.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“parked in a little, whopper-jawed line in the hayfield across the way. We joined them, then”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“With the sad news came a whispered reminder, an urgent refrain: no social media. No email, no Facebook, no goddamn Twitter. Though he might have belonged to the world at one time, Gabriel was ours first and last, and we intended to send him home without bringing the circus to town.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“Josiah said he could straighten the structure with the horses and reinforce the posts, but as he went into more detail, I stopped him. I said, please, Josiah. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, I trust you. I don’t need to hear more. As a younger woman, I often found myself bewildered by Josiah’s ability to carry on with practical concerns while rocked by affliction. I had come to see this as a gift from the Lord, perhaps a gift He gives to all men in greater abundance. For so long I’d misread Josiah’s steady calm, his ability to build things, to eat with a robust appetite, even to sleep soundly most nights, as indifference. But it is his own way of shouldering into hardship, like a sailor on deck in a gale, refusing, on principle, to turn his back to the howling wind.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“the internet is a sewage dump, a toilet where anonymous assholes compete to out-ignorant each other.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“told myself to treasure every minute I had with him. It is a lesson we should heed every day we spend with those we love, but we squander so many of our earthly hours. I vowed to be more attentive to love in the time we had left.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“Hopper’s Nighthawks, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist,”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“There’s a Monet painting of stacks of wheat, just an ordinary farm scene in France, that looks as if it had been painted with sunlight and sky rather than oil paint. I could look at that Monet all day long.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“love was all the same water, perhaps it lapped a bit differently on each shore that it touched? Or perhaps it shaped itself to the depth and breadth of the vessels that contained it? Enjoy what you have, Thomas wrote. Enjoy every minute of it. Youth is a seemingly bottomless gift, but it has a short shelf life.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants

“In the 1870s, during a surge of nationalist fervor initiated by western Indian wars, some locals wanted to rename the town Custer. That motion was soundly defeated when an old conjurer with one eye and raven hair rose to say the land would be cursed if they renamed it for someone who’d had his ass handed to him by a mob of screaming savages. When that one-eyed woman later died, two nuns going through her cabin discovered she was Lakota Sioux.”
― Ron Rindo, Life, and Death, and Giants