Simon the Fiddler Quotes

“They were all too young to die and always would be.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody,”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, peculiar intervals, unheard notes.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“Please, God, kill that man with a fever, his horse falling over backward with him, a Comanche arrow in the eye. And then because he was in a church he added, In the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ amen. Thanks in advance.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“Become wise, young man, and cynical, and life will be far more understandable.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“MacFarland could imitate people; he used to make Simon laugh until he was paralytic. He told stories about his grandfather and the Shawnee wars and they were always somehow funny. It was different then. The air was different and the long remote crying of the steamboat whistles as they came down from the Monongahela and Pittsburgh seemed to tell a story of a great nation and a great people with adventure and the look of distance in their eyes, and now it was somehow soiled with the stench of the dead. MacFarland was dead. Lincoln was dead. Neighbors had shot one another dead. It was not the same country.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“She has always known that the animals live between ourselves and the rest of Creation. How like us they are and how unlike. All people are only people, but there are a great plenty of animals of all kinds and they are each one named in the Book of Life.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“She has always loved animals. She has always been mystified by them, pulling carriages, dragging a plow, the heedful dogs guarding the sheep on the hillsides, her striped cat stalking a rat behind the grain bin. They fascinate her for reasons she does not know, but she knows we owe them for their trust, the ones that have come to live with us.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“His future was all there like a three-draw spyglass shut up and compact and he would draw it out cylinder by cylinder.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“there was only one prison in Texas, and that was in Huntsville, but it was a place for hardened criminals and those who had used firearms to deprive others of their goods and savings, who had shot somebody in a political argument, had chopped up other people into tiny bits, that’s the kind of people they send to Huntsville.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“His future was all there like a three-draw spyglass shut up and compact and he would draw it out cylinder by cylinder. Behind him were the flames of a burning barn in Kentucky and a childhood of bastardy. The worst was knowing all the time he was a good fiddler, even a superb fiddler, but long before this time and surely now many a good man had gone down to ruin or death unrecognized and probably drunk into the bargain.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“May a cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

“He was going to have somebody reading the evening news to him for quite some time.”
― Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler