Rough Animals Quotes

“Why is it always the horse that dies first, and never you?” the girl asked.
“Because of strength of will.”
She stopped with the sand.
“Does that still matter out here?”
“It always does.”
“That sounds like fate.”
The mule shifted and he put a hand on one of its legs.
“Well, maybe it’s fate.”
“Then what is fate?” she asked, the voice seeming amputated and roving in the sightless black.
“It’s somethin you’re born with. Somethin that’s passed down from the fathers before and shows itself in triggers that weren’t meant to be pulled and triggers that were. You caint control it and can only look back on it as explanation for why you did the things you did even if they’ve ruined you because it couldn’t have been any other way.”
“Can you fight against it?”
“Yeah, like you can fight against the land.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Fate is only a number, a count of how much time you have left”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“It’s my aim in life to defy my past. It’s your aim in life to resolve yours.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Only killing done without a purpose would be gratuitous, but there’s no gratuitous violence among men. A fox goes into a killing frenzy and destroys more than it needed but it doesn’t know why. Each man is born with an amount of power, and some amass more power by violence, and others test it in violence and by gambling either gain more or give all theirs up to others. Power not as brute strength but as the number of days a man has. Every man has metal waiting for him whether it’s a bullet or knife or gurney, and an act that extends your days beyond what you were born with can never be gratuitous. That’s the truth behind all killing.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Killing’s not an end but a transfer of power. Like how protein is never wasted in death, just redirected to another use, power’s the same. It’s transferred to control over life, or one more day alive. If you kill sincerely, it’s impersonal, done without hesitation, and with the intent to use it to its fullest purpose.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“... I realized quick there’s no other life than this one, this’s the only one that’s real.”
“What makes it real?”
“The nature of men.”
“What nature is that?”
“Survival. Fighting to live. The concept of ‘living’ is a construct. It’s the only state any of us have experienced and so we have nothing to compare it to, nothin else we’ve ever been. In itself, it doesn’t mean anything. But if you bring in the threat of death, suddenly it’s got a definition by opposites. You can see living and not-living right there in front of you. It’s only in those minutes that you’re actively aware that you’re living.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“There’s two things will kill you in the desert, and half of it’s the thirst and the other half’s letting your mind go to it.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“sunset. When Smith awoke it was if he had awakened from something like dying and was unsure that he hadn’t, and if you died would you take the violence you’ve committed with you or would it remain as a scar upon the earth. And if the physical manifestation of it meant a thing, he knew that if he survived and made it back home and lived a long life that his body would rot into moss and dissolve centuries before the dried out bones of those he’d felled in the desert started to decay.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“. The only way to influence another’s fate is by destroying them. It’s the only thing that can be done permanently and by an action within your control. To try to protect someone is to try to intervene in the actions of the world against them but that’s something you can’t face alone or entirely because if fate has bullets for them you can only take one.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Don’t say ‘ever.’ At this point in history every reason man could use for killing he’s used. But you’re wrong—there are men who fear their image in others. It’s something to do with sharing their fate.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“In the wilderness there’s no such thing as right.”
“Fuck your principles.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Her abilities aren’t backed by reason, and she took it too far.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Thing had traveled three hundred million years and countless miles into the dirt and under seas and back up again only to be split by the stolen bullet of a cartel man. Goddamn shit way to go, even for a prehistoric bug.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“There’s a thin balance between the things you’re given and the way you can make things be,”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Men think they know the desert like they think they know violence. But they’re always wrong, on both counts”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“She grew a knowledge of fighting and of guns and of how men act under the influence of desperation and fear.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“. Everything’s done for survival to some degree. But there’s a difference between killing a bird that you’ll starve without or killing a man who’s got a knife to your throat and killing a calf that will feed you for a week or killing a man who will probably come back for you with a rifle inside of a month. The man who has a knife to your throat has brought his bones to that place knowing he might leave them there for good. But the man who is gradually readying a bullet for you will not see it coming if you get to him before he thinks to go for you. You always have to survive, but sometimes you have the foresight to survive so much that you move bones.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“True violence has no reason behind it, but killing when it’s justified is a byproduct of life. Like leaving behind waste or the bones of a chicken you had to eat. No more than any other man did before you and will do after you and so on until they’re all gone.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“It was the kind of desert quiet that few men experience in their lifetimes, and the ones who experience it more than a few times start inventing voices to fill the silence.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“There are two ways to die in the desert. Heatstroke and disembowelment. The coyotes would get to you either way, but the dehydration determined whether you were still alive when they did.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“a clean slate so clean that even the hand of a god could not have made a forest grow there.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“There is an unmarked line in Utah, somewhere among the flatworm lengths of invisible county borders, past the point when you can say you’re headed South and are now already in it and just going further down, where the plain opens forward and the plateaus are too high on either side for you to see the sun and so the sun seems to come from the ground itself. He watched the earth shed its green skin and dry into tan bruises of acacia bramble and sand–the top fingers of the desert, spread upon the map from below like a callus on the earth.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“A lone spider crawled over the tops of the blades of grass and chose the unfortunate direction of the base of the fire. Felt the heat and scuttled under the drying nose of the heifer in another poor decision, another set of carbon parts to crinkle and collapse under the heat. Like the snakes that propelled themselves through the wheat only to fall under tractor blades, and the insects that chopped across stems like calcium machines, and the worms that hooked and churned and overturned again and again in bovine guts, over and over and dead dead dead. A land that was built to consume them and to consume their descendants over and over once again. To consume him, and he pulled his hand away from the wild oat strands he held as if they were hot and then sunk his hands back in.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“Things borne from hell must’ve come better equipped.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals

“He had not bled like this before and with it came the shattering understanding of the body as a machine, the warm sludge running down like oil and with it flecks of canvas jacket, the casing for the mechanism.”
― Rae DelBianco, Rough Animals