The Sense of Touch Quotes

“Never trust anything, not until you can touch it. With touch, you know you know.”
― Ron Parsons, The Sense of Touch

“They were relaxing at the top of a waterfall, in a small, still pool where the mountain waters hit an upward slope of folded granite. It was sort of a rounded bathtub, carved out of the rock throughout the centuries by the rushing river, a river so hidden that it was without a name. Just below were the falls, about a 30-foot drop into another, much larger pool of clearest water that was gathered for a respite, a compromise in the river's relentless schedule downward, between split-level decks of flat rock. Further on, the river reanimated and released into a sharp ravine, pulling westward, down through the rugged mountains and faceless forest--the Black Hills National Forest--gaining force until it joined with the rush of the Castle River, near the old Custer Trail, and was swallowed into the Deerfield Reservoir to collect and prepare for the touch of man.”
― Ron Parsons, The Sense of Touch

“For no reason that she could discern, she put down the novel and picked up her cell phone. She was lonely, yes, but had been so for as long as she cared to remember, and nothing seemed to be pressing that particular bruise, one of many, at the moment. Her loneliness was at a comfortable echelon: not growing like a tree, nor multiplying as a moss, but just simply there. A permanent, weathered embedded rock. A boulder in the wheat field. A bullet inside of a body, too dangerous to remove, around which tissue grows.”
― Ron Parsons, The Sense of Touch

“As they drifted down the Apple River, Virgil felt as though a medicine was moving through him, flushing his cells with a natural liquid peace. The quiet shrilly of katydids and the soft song of moving water permeated the air. He watched Chantel slowly spinning in the currents, her eyelids fluttering in a way he'd never seen before, her ebony face drenched in sunshine, feet kicking lazily in the water. He wanted to think only of her, in this calm river vision, releasing all other thoughts from his head like flocks and flocks of birds, every species known to man, shooting out of a cavern and filling the sky.”
― Ron Parsons, The Sense of Touch

“But with Naseem and me, it was like we had never known each other at all. It's a cruel, skewered ecosystem in which a high school student exists. I'm not trying to justify it. Things that at the time seem entirely logical, defensible even, can make a person years later ashamed. Not necessarily of acts one has perpetrated, but omissions of basic decency. Averted eyes, abruptly ended conversations, unextended offers to include. Such things are scythes across the backs of even the most normal teens. And Naseem, it was generally acknowledged, was not your most normal teen.”
― Ron Parsons, The Sense of Touch