The Delta Highway Quotes

“October air, complete with dancing leaves and sighing winds greeted him as he stepped from the bus onto the dusty highway. Coolness embraced. The scent of burning wood hung crisp in the air from somewhere far in the distance. His backpack dropped in a flutter of dust. He surveyed dying cornfields from the gas station bus stop. Seeing this place, for the first time in over twenty years, brought back a flood of memories, long buried and forgotten.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway

“He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway

“He had not joined in on the laughter or even on the beating. Violence of any sort horrified him. Nevertheless, he stood by while Mike, their leader, drove a boot down on Joe’s hand. The hideous cracking sound of breaking bones came into his mind and a helpless shudder ran through him. Joe, whose high piercing scream against the autumn skies of indifference, replayed in his memory with shrill agony. Several times, he had shouted: “He’s had enough! Let up on him!” Which earned him looks of contempt from the others. They had left the kid there, screaming in that back alley. He remembered trying to drown those screams out of his mind.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway

“As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway

“He slipped a dollar bill into a machine for a plastic soda bottle. Prices and plastic bottles with cute names signaled he was in the present day. That and the tattooed arm that reached for the bottle.”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway

“We are fortunate men then,” Frank smiled. “Most people, even the ones who are lucky enough to like what they do, find themselves feeling hopelessly trapped in horror. Horror at the fact they are going to have to do the same things, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. They long for vacations and better money to get them out of the useless wheel. The wheel that so many will grind away at until their deaths. Do you think that men like you and I can just lose ourselves with a certain sense of delusion into pretending that we like what we do?”
― Jaime Allison Parker, The Delta Highway