The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World Quotes

“Yet this city (San Francisco) was also a final refuge for many who had roamed the world, and finally found the home of their hearts...And while I heard every sort of prosaic answer when I asked those people what brought and kept them here, each somehow also hinted at a deeper reason, having something to do with freedom from expectations, freedom from the past, often freedom from their families; we do not admit much that families can be a kind of prison from which we yearn to escape, yet this is incontrovertibly so, as I know too well myself.”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghost, unrooted and uprooted .... the Kwakwaka'wakw mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plain of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season --- they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“I am no heroic figure, but a man like any other, capable of selfish and selfless at once, of light and dark, courage and cravenness; all men are two men, always at war with each other, isn’t that so? We don masks, we perform parts, we adopt personas, but we are never one sort of man, and not another. Even the greatest among us knows this to be so; perhaps the wisest among us are those who admit it most easily.”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“He paused, for a while, and then smiled, and apologized for waxing philosophical, which is one of the lesser vices, and a habit that Mrs Carson, bless her perspicacity, said he would be wise to break; he was trying assiduously, he said, to only wax philosophical on Tuesdays, and so reduce the sin to a weekly thing, like whiskey or cigars, best enjoyed in parsimonious dosages. He paused again, lost in thought;”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“We do not acknowledge enough, I think, the clan and tribe of our friends, who are not assigned to us by blood, or given to us to love by a merciful Creator, but come to us by grace and gift from the mass of men, stepping forth unannounced from the passing multitudes, and into our lives; and so very often stepping right into the inner chambers of our hearts. In so many ways we celebrate those we love as wife or husband, father and mother, brother and sister, daughter and son; but it is our friends whom we choose, and who choose us; it is our friends we turn to abashed, when we are bruised and broken by love and pain; it is our friends whose affection and kindness are food and fink to our spirits, and sustain and invigorate us when we are worn and weary.”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“We do not acknowledge enough, I think, the clan and tribe of our friends, who are not assigned to us by blood, or given to us to love by a merciful Creator, but come to us by grace and gift from the mass of men, stepping forth unannounced from the passing multitudes, and into our lives; and so very often stepping right into the inner chambers of our hearts. In so many ways we celebrate those we love as wife or husband, father and mother, brother and sister, daughter and son; but it is our friends whom we choose, and who choose us; it is our friends we turn to abashed, when we are bruised and broken by love and pain; it is our friends whose affection and kindness are food and drink to our spirits, and sustain and invigorate us when we are worn and weary.”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“...your twenties are the years when a man wends and wanders, searching for who knows what - we say money or love or adventure, but I think those are words we invent to drape reason on the unreasonable.”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“I began to wonder if he was not very consciously and deliberately choosing particular chapters of his life to tell, in order to tell me other things, perhaps --- about the nature and power of stories, about how decisions not only reflect but create character, about how stories actually shape our lives; could it be that the words we choose to have resident in our mouths act as a sort of mysterious food, and soak down into our blood and bones, and form that which we wish to be?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson