One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow Quotes

“Before the power of Nature, its inescapable presence and fixed dominion, all men and women are as mice in the talons of the hawk. In a city, I could well imagine—surrounded by streets and commerce and carriages, everyone dressed Sunday-fine, with the forests and fields only a thin shadow on a distant horizon—a body might trick itself into believing that mankind held the world in its white-knuckled hand. But on our homestead, the wilderness ran right up to the front door.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“God is said to be great, the worm told me, so great you cannot see Him. But God is small, with hands like threads, and they reach for you everywhere you go. The hands touch everything—even you, even me. What falls never falls; what grows has grown a thousand times, and will live a thousand times more. Wherever hand touches hand, the Oneness comes to stay. Once God has made a thing whole, it cannot be broken again.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Each had taken up the truths they had trained themselves to see, drinking anger and hate or loneliness and despair as eagerly as the summer-parched prairie drank the rain. I ain’t fool enough to think I’m wise, exactly, but I have learned one scrap of wisdom, at least: whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“There the seeds would dream through winter till the season of sowing came again.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“If they could open their hands and release the old guide ropes to which they had always clung—anger and timidity, lonesomeness and fear, judgment and the fear of being judged—they would free their spirits to seek and find a new way of being, new eyes through which to see.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Beyond the borders of the land that was his lay the wilderness that was its own. The upthrust stone, the shoulders of the Bighorns, reddish gray where they stood near to the homestead and blue where they stood far—bluer, dissipating veils of blue lost against an indistinct horizon. The pale gold of autumn grass like the rough hide of an animal, wind-riffled down the mountain’s flank. The low trough where the river ran, a score mark in wet clay—dark, shadow-and-green, redolent of moving water, of soil that never went dry. And the infinite sweep of the prairie, yellow shaded with folds of violet until, a hundred miles away or more, the whole plain was swallowed by color and consumed, taken up by the lower edge of a sagging purple sky.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Clyde”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“So you hardened yourself and hoped the fear couldn’t touch you. But once you’ve turned yourself to stone, love can’t reach you, either.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“The seasons don’t cease to change because we haven’t the time to plant or tend or harvest, because grief like a hailstorm comes up sudden and frightens us with its noise. Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“the sky became reality—the solidness, the wholeness—and the earth below was ethereal, shifting through veils of color, parting light with shadow and shadow with light, all the way out to the horizon where a sheet of rain slanted between Heaven and earth, its edges indistinct, swallowing prairie and sky in a motionless blue mist.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“What seemed an individual, whole and distinct, was tied inextricably to its neighbors.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“When had time grown such rapid and vigorous wings? The day already felt as if it were slipping away and she had little hope of catching it.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“wasn’t afraid. I haven’t found anything yet in this life that’s worth being afraid of.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Horses were easier to understand than folks ever were. There never was a time when he preferred to reflect on the nature of people rather than the nature of horses. People—men especially—hid their thoughts and their hearts behind thick, stoic walls, a dense blank-white nothingness, a silent room, a distant stare. Men hid what they couldn’t control till the burden of that featureless mask grew too much to bear, and then they threw it off and broke it with a shout or a swinging fist. Or a rifle shot at the riverside. Then they picked up the pieces of their unreadable disguise and fitted them back together and donned the mask again. That was never the way with horses. Once you understood their language—the flick of an ear, the stamp of a hoof, a ripple running down sun-hot hide from withers to flank—horses couldn’t surprise”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“And the infinite sweep of the prairie, yellow shaded with folds of violet until, a hundred miles away or more, the whole plain was swallowed by color and consumed, taken up by the lower edge of a sagging purple sky.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“She would keep nothing to herself now. Her heart had opened with Beulah's eyes, and gladness had flooded in. She could feel it rising, threatening to overspill its banks.

[Nettie Mae - italics] Let joy run out of me. Let it soak the barren ground of this house--my home--and let something new and bright grow up from the field of my past bitterness.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Beulah looked up into Clyde's face. The tears had dried on her cheeks. "I'll marry you someday."
Clyde laughed--a choking, bitter sound, for what chance had they now of marrying? "I never asked you."
"You will someday," Beulah said. "So I'm telling you now: my answer is yes.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“He took her hand. He could feel the faint stickiness of sap from the flowers. She smelled of yarrow, pungent, green and sharp. They said nothing more, for it had become their custom to feel rather than speak--to sense the mood and direction of the other, to trust as the creatures of the prairie trusted to their instincts. Wordless, hand in hand, they mourned.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“He should have shot the lamb the night before. That was true, too; he ought to have done the proper thing, the manly thing. Clyde couldn't tell, couldn't imagine, why he hadn't gone through with it. But the night before, after he and Beulah had bedded down the ewe and her offspring in the stall, he had lain awake on his cot listening to the hearth fire. At first, every snap of cinder and spark had been distinct, but as sleep settled into him, the crackling fire had blurred and blended to a low and steady music. It was one sound, one song, the wind across the prairie was one endless breath, a body that never stopped sighing. It put Clyde in mind of the dream--the fever dream, and the certainty of oneness that had come to him then--all separate and distinct sounds merging into one endless hum.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“Every seed puts down roots in its own time and grows to its greenest power.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“The oaten heaviness of the air, the thick-porridge density of it, the way its odor of dryness and limpness sank down among fresher scents of green and dew and lay there, immobile as a dead thing.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“I haven’t found anything yet in this life that’s worth being afraid of.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“And the wilderness would go on existing long after mankind had fallen to dust and blown away on a rain-scented wind.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“soaked another rag and held it to his lips. Confused,”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“outward from the stone wall, a deterrent against the wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions who would”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“I know,” I replied. “I guess that’s partly because I’ve known for a long time that Tron was going to die soon. But also, it’s because I know that death isn’t anything to fear. It’s very special; it’s sacred. Think about all the animals in the world, and all the plants, and everything else that lives. All the millions of different kinds of life in the world. We’re all so different from one another, but there are two experiences we all share. One is birth—or hatching from an egg, or sprouting from a seed, or however life begins. The other is death. Whatever kind of life we are, we all begin and we all end. In the beginnings and the endings, we can understand each other, and that makes a great connection among us all.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow