Descent Quotes

“Long after everyone else has given up and gone home and gotten on with their lives, he would keep on believing because, without evidence, you could never kill his belief.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain?”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“And how will you know him, Grant? How will you recognize this bad man God has sent you?” “That’s the easy part,” said Grant, and he looked up from his hands and Billy saw his eyes in their sockets like small openings to some blue flame of the skull. “I will know this man because he will be the next man who attempts to hurt anyone I love.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“It’s a poor carpenter blames his tools.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I like a good story, don’t get me wrong. But a man should never be the hero of his own stories. Nobody likes those stories.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Leaving’s hard,” he said. “But it ain’t the hardest thing. Is it.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Because you could not talk to the world. You could not pray to it or love it or damn it to hell. With the world there could be no discussion, and with no discussion there could be no terms, and with no terms there could be no grace.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“There was such randomness in the world, the passing faces told him, such strange and meaningless intersections—this man could be him, or this man.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Now I wonder why a man lives so long he doesn’t even know the world he’s in anymore.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“An old aunt of mine told me one time, Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“The boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“found”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Yes:”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. The most absolute, the most terrible love.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does. It just breaks and breaks and breaks once more.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Daddy, she said.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Is this some kind of joke?”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught. —W. B. YEATS”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“What we chang’d Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“But neither does He permit them not to bear it. Therefore He asks His children to bear the unbearable.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Belief never stood a chance against disbelief,”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“Why would I want to see a man who doesn’t want to see me?”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“lungs. I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes. Don’t you?”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“the bike began to jerk in mechanical palsy as he cursed through the gears.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“but herself. The small woman doctor walked ahead of him. Her brother walked on the other side of the bed and a man she didn’t”
― Tim Johnston, Descent

“She felt the pills under her heart like a hundred small hands holding it aloft.”
― Tim Johnston, Descent