The Descent Quotes

“Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave.

Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light.

There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Children were brought to see him. His legend spread quickly. Wherever he went, it was known that this was a holy man, captured with small houses of souls around his neck.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Life’s too short for doubt, and yet too long for faith.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“What a remarkable conceit civilization is,”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Their seduction of her had begun. No great mystery there. It was the seduction of a storybook land, the seduction of becoming an expatriate. You fell for a place like darkest Africa or Paris or Kathmandu, and soon you had no nation of your own, and you were simply a citizen of time. He'd learned that down here.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“If you let it be just as it was, the world was a surfeit of riches. Hold still, and the entire universe was your lover. But it was too late for that.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Nude, she felt the warmth of the lamps on her flesh. From the corner of her eye, she saw the light from twenty eons ago turn her into gold.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“My friends, we've looked into the dark water so long it has become a mirror.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“At times, she felt trapped by their autobiographies. They wanted her to protect them from their own monsters.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Oh, I believe in it,' de l'Orme reassured him. 'But for what it is, not for what you would have it be.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“All at once, Ali felt powerfully isolated from these people, estranged and peculiar. It was not a new feeling. She had always been a little different, from her classmates as a child, from the novitiates at St. Mary's, from the world. For some reason, she hadn't expected it here, though.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Do you ever ask yourselves who you can really trust?' Walker folded his contract and closed it in his daybook. 'Let me submit that the one thing in this world you can always trust is self-interest. And now you know mine.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Yet, even as we speak, similar evil plays out in a hundred different places, ours upon them, theirs upon us. Until we can bring some sense of order to bear, the evil will continue to have a hiding place.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“People are scared. Maybe it's a form of racial catharsis. There's this revulsion or anger or terror. People seem to feel they have to lay waste to these things, even after they've killed them. Maybe they think they're destroying evil.'
'Do you?' asked Thomas.
Her almond eyes were sad. Then disciplined. Either way, compassion or science, she did not.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“That's enough, though. I'm a firm believer that each of us comes into this world with our decisions already made.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Hunter and hunted, one in spirit.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“By dawn, good would triumph over evil, light over darkness - the usual fairy tale.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Every side had committed atrocities in the name of God or history or boundaries or revenge.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“The landscape changed; the hatreds did not.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“...and the old monologue rolled around in her head. It was like a broken record, her mea culpas. The fact was, when she dove, she dove deep. Controversy be damned. She was forever running ahead of the pack.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“It made her mad. Maybe she was a bit too proud. And profane at times. With a temper, yes. And indiscreet, certainly. She'd made a few mistakes. Who hadn't?”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“They had not welcomed her coming; that had taken some time. But her departure was causing real anguish, for she had brought a little light into their darkness, or at least a little medicine and diversion.
It wasn't fair. Her coming had meant good things for them. And now they were being punished for her sins.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Stick,' he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency.”
― Jeff Long, The Descent

“And in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost”
― Jeff Long, The Descent