Heat & Light Quotes

“He could have cured cancer by now, if he’d never gotten high.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“Half of sobriety was wishing you’d never started: if you’d never taken that first drink, first bump, you could have stayed clean forever with no sweat at all. Instead, it became your life’s work.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“As we grow, we learn to overcome the tendency to run and hide from ourselves and our feelings. When we feel trapped or pressured, it takes great spiritual and emotional strength to be honest.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“The truth is that he doesn’t like to move his laptop. In his barren apartment it hums continuously. Evenings, weekends, he spends most hours in front of it. Ambidextrous, he mouses with his left hand and eats dinner with his right.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“At a bar addiction is normalized, made to seem a regular part of living: the warm light and familiar faces, friendship or the illusion of it. Addicts are lonely creatures.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“Stomach issues aren’t typical. But let me do some research.” Trexler scribbles on a notepad. “What about breathing problems? That’s usually what we see in cases of methane contamination.” “She has asthma,” Shelby says. Trexler’s face lights. “There’s a known connection between asthma and methane migration.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“Sewage treatment plants use disinfectants to kill bacteria.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“He looks out over his back yard, what’s left of it. With the forest gone, the property looks smaller than sixty acres, stripped and shrunken like a dog in the bath. Behind the house, the crew left a single patch of grass, twenty foot square. Beyond lies a vast expanse of bare earth, dry and cocoa-colored, enclosed with chain-link fence. A bleak view, but not half as bad as what lies over the hill. The”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“They say the eyes are the first thing to go”—he glances meaningfully at the reading glasses—“but I say it’s curiosity. People hit middle age and they stop questioning. That’s aging. That’s the beginning of the end.” “Questioning? Give me a break. You figured out the world in 1979, at a Grateful Dead show probably, and haven’t questioned anything since. Well, demonstrate all you want, if it makes you feel righteous. But trust me, that’s the only benefit.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“It’s just like Darren to worry about poor people in China while giving no thought to poor people in America, who need Walmart because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else—a losers’ club Rich feels, eternally, on the brink of joining, if he hasn’t already.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“He has never joined the coffee-drinking masses at his neighborhood Starbucks, who assemble daily in order to ignore each other completely—humans of every age and description deafened by headphones, staring dumbly at their glowing screens. Each morning Darren studies them as he waits in line for his double espresso. Then he orders his coffee, sweetens generously, and leaves. The”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“But once you start taking money out of my pocket, I got to say something.” He spits deliberately. “Your land sets right in the middle of where they need to run them wells. I’m getting wells, Richard here is getting wells. Hell, even Jim Norton is getting wells, with the little spread he has. But until you sign that paper, none of us are going to see a dime.” Mack”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“He talks the way sprinters run and dancers dance, an elite athlete. He talks as though he was born to talk. At”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light

“are unsightly but eloquent, a timid girl’s”
― Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light