Fourth of July Creek Quotes

“I ask is there anything with a little kick to drink. And this old lady says to me, We don’t approve of alcohol. And I says, Well, ma’am, we need to remember Jesus did turn water to wine. And she says, And we’re none too crazy about that stunt, neither.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“wyoming forever. You could wyom all day and not make any progress. To wyom was to go from nowhere to nowhere. Through nowhere. To see nothing. To do nothing but sit. You turn on the radio and wyom through the dial slowly, carefully in search of a sliver of civilization only to find a man talking about the price of stock animals and feed. You listen to a dour preacher wyoming about your bored and dying and wyoming soul.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“...the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Wild mushrooms and carpets of moss and bumblebees turning figure eights in the slashes of sun in the woods, as if they too are stupefied by the beauty of the place.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“At this point, even Jesus and Satan just wish you’d choose a fucking side.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn't need permission, that there is no novel evil it won't embrace.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Pete slept too, his chin resting on his chest. He dreamed as well. A diamond turned on his forehead. A tree. He was a landscape. He was covered with trees. He was the Yaak. He was Glacier. He was all the tremendous valleys of western Montana, cloud shadows grazing over him. Storm fronts broke against his nose. He was sparsely populated. He was a city. He teemed with highways and lights. He dreamed he had a sister, a beautiful girl, and in the dream he reasoned out that the girl was Rachel and what he was actually dreaming was a spirit inside of his, a sibling she’d never had, a son. He dreamed that we all contain so many masses and that people are simply potentialities, instances, cases. That all of life can be understood as casework. That DFS was a kind of priesthood.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“There was a time with his wife on this river or a river just like it, it can't be this river, but in his memory it is this one. A time on a wash just like this where he lay shirtless with her shivering in the August night, jeans pasted dark and wet to his knocking legs, his torso white to glowing in the moonlight. Her hair tendriled and framed about her face like an outlandish black tattoo. Her wet dress like a sleeve of molting skin, which of a sort it had been that whole night in their dancing. Her heart in its red and white cage knocking just inches from his own, like two young prisoners tapping out simpleton Morse I am here I am here I am here. Here I am for your pleasure for you forever. On a river like this where he impregnated her. A river promise too, he said I love you I love you. Seventeen years old. A pleasure so total that even then he knew he had mortgaged years to her and he did not care.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“How trout looked in that water, brown and wavering and glinting all the colors there were and maybe some that didn’t really exist on the color wheel, a color, say, that was moss and brown-spotted like peppercorns and a single terra-cotta-colored stone and a flash of sunlight all at once. That color existed in the water here.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Charles Snow had been as spiritually curious as a fence post, and Pete doubted that his father had ever changed in any meaningful way, even after Pete’s mother died. But there was an aptness to his late conversion, as though he always knew that at the end of his life he’d have to do something to avoid going to hell.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Chromed long-haulers glinted like showgirls among logging trucks caked in oatmealy mud, white exhaust thrashing flamelike in the wind from their silvery stacks.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Pete realized that to Pearl, Satan had staged the world in this and every ancient particular. Pete imagined what it would feel like to believe such a thing, to see the very Devil ranging about the Earth like an art director, crafting fictions in the schists and coal seams and limestone. All to cast doubt on the Bible’s timeline. All for the harvest of lost souls. Maybe it would be worth it for the Devil. You could almost picture it. Almost. You could almost believe a book more real than the real, more actual and relevant than terra firma and all the dull laws that govern it. “You know, Jeremiah,” Pete said, “if I believed the things you did, I’d act at least as batshit as you do.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“He was frightened for her and what was about to happen to her and felt the fullest burden of the fact that he was indeed a thing that had happened to her too and was happening to her yet and would be for a long time to come. He”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Did it unnerve Rachel? Rose. Did it unnerve Rose? Yes. Why? Because her mother’s heart was wyoming, it was wyoming hard, and she was days and years and maybe forever from a good man.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“You gotta believe. You can’t just go through life acting like there are answers to every—”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Maybe it was the state of childhood to not question and fear everything, it’d been so long, Pete couldn’t remember.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“did I do that?” She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other. “I was already gone,” Pete said.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Innocent, be untroubled a while longer.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Ursula pushed his hair behind his ears. His chin pillowed on her perfumed tits. A bitter smell from her armpits. We’re all animals. Just dancing bears in tutus and monkeys with cigarettes. Painted up and stuffed into clown cars. “You’re”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“You see your daughter now in toto, from a vantage point not even fatherhood has given you, a new place. You don't know her trajectory, weren't meant to know it, because of her or by circumstance. You simply wish her well. A voice in you is saying to keep her safe, warm, to light her way, for her to know little fear and to have bravery and joy.
After a while it occurs to you that this is a prayer.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“A certain disheveled preacher in downtown Indianapolis shows them his .22 pistol under his corduroy jacket and asks can’t they find a service for normal people, don’t they see his flock is demented.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“You get drunk, your dad whups you, and you spend the day baling hay or mending fence puking your guts out. That’s the way it’s done. And you drink whiskey not fuckin vodka and you sure as shit don’t do it with your puckered asshole!”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Yeah, sure, it’s not my time of the month, don’t worry about it, I ain’t getting pregnant. I do too much speed. My ovaries are broke.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Washington was a slaver and a Mason. And Lincoln issued fiat scrip to pay for his war on the states.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn’t need permission, that there is no novel evil it won’t embrace.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Is one woman all women, he asked himself. Do they know what they do to us. Do they try on cocks like shoes, and keep some of them and put back others.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“man who’d won a bet with a good friend. Pearl stiffened and said he could take what God”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Pete scoffed. “That ranch is a hobby.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“The judge waved him off, and closed the door.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Sarcasm is just anger.” “You’re an idiot.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek