Liberation Quotes

“There must be something better than this world, and the world must be better than this.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“We do not know what is on the other side of the storm.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“Transcendence and dissolution, always the same thing.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

“His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“The war could kill the faith in him, too, if he was not strong or careful enough. He could feel it fluttering within him sometimes, a bird in a cage of knives. Its own blood on its face and wings.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“You know," she had said, "I believe we are all given at least one moment in our lives when the world reveals itself to us, in all its workings. We comprehend everything at once, and then forget almost all of it a second later, because none of us could hold it all in our heads. But we are changed afterward," shaking her head, "in a most profound way.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“The war keeps taking pieces of me anyway. Makes the rest of me harder to hit.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“Marco smiles, they shake hands, and Robert Blackfeather Sherman sees it again, as he did when Marco knelt before him just a few minutes ago: The light warps around Marco Angelo Oliveira; the colors of the trees and sky stretch and smear, as if Marco is an empty place in the shape of a man and the earth and air around him are screaming to fill it.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America

“I have been to so many funerals now. We bury them in the gray soil, stand over the mounds, lean on our shovels. Say the same words again and again. But there are pregnancies too, children coming. A woman like a great egg. Another just conceived. They help us dig, then turn and spit into the earth. They will not say it, but they cannot keep it all in either. For their coming children are their hopes embodied, their faith made flesh, that all that is ending is beginning again. For the world will not be fallen to their children. It will only be the world, new as they are. And perhaps if we tell them enough, if we say the right thing, they will see a way out, and know what to do.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“She imagined sometimes that kindness would come as an annihilating flood. Drown the war and us with it, recede just when we were on the edge of death. Leave us lying faceup on the ground, staring into the brilliant sky. Thankful for every breath.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything

“Nothing of it spoken between them. They could read it on each other, their faces wrinkled pages. Words hiding in the folds of their clothes. She was made of letters then, as all of us are now. Here, in these words. Us and the city and the towns and river, and everything else, too. All that we know, and everything—everyone—we wish we knew.”
― Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything