Night Run Quotes

“I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence. I'd often had to pull over and take a pee along that godforsaken beltway. There were crickets rubbing their legs together in the cotton and wheat, grasshoppers jumping through the corn stalks, and June bugs flittering above the fields. Occasionally while relieving myself I'd even hear a lone armadillo burrowing. Tonight, however, I heard nothing. Less than nothing. Always there existed a strangeness here the truckers talked about, but tonight something had inexplicably hushed the sounds of night and made it stranger. The silence itself was dead; the kind of silence you get high up in the mountains when it snows, hushing the entire world beneath a white blanket. The blanket along Damnation Road was black, and it felt…unnatural." - NIGHT RUN - Bobby Underwood”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“So I volunteered for the night run, sleeping by day like a vampire to avoid those reasonably happy people who had settled for less than heaven. I'd had the door shut on those soft, sensuous pearly gates one too many times, left to stand sheepishly on my little tarnished cloud as I watched someone else enter paradise with the one I worshipped. The heart can only take so much before it begins to hide in shame at its own foolishness.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“Like all romantics, I wanted the kind of love that didn't exist in this world, at least not in my time. It had once upon a time, but it had faded like the final scene of a black and white movie long ago, never to return.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“Even in this state, after what had been done to her, she was beautiful. Behind the pain in her eyes lived spring, if they hadn't crushed it into a permanent winter." - Night Run”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“I was at least four-hundred miles from life of any kind on this particular night when it began to rain. It was one of those summer rains that come down in buckets but pass quickly. I had a full load and no desire to slide off into a ditch so I gradually slowed, the air brakes whining like a lonely animal in the deep darkness. I pulled off onto the gravel shoulder and that's when I saw her. I came close to rolling over her because of the rain as she lay curled up in a fetal position. Her entire body was shaking so hard it frightened me. The rain was pouring but she made no effort to move.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“Another tear rolled slowly down her cheek, like liquid pain escaping from her broken heart.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“Lone Tree was a cow-town without the cow. No one I ever talked to had an answer as to how it had sprung up here in the middle of nowhere, nor did they know who the genius was who had thought it a good idea. Picture an old western ghost town, add a filling-station, an abandoned drive-in, a couple of folks milling about just so you knew someone lived there, and you'd be pretty close to Lone Tree.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run

“I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence.”
― Bobby Underwood, Night Run