When These Mountains Burn Quotes

“It had never been that addicts don’t care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“His mind turned instantly back to what had been troubling him over the past week. He was grieving the loss of a place and a people. It was hard enough to bury the bodies of those you loved, but it was another sadness altogether to witness the death of a culture. There was the gone and the going away, and there was the after. He found it difficult to imagine what would become of this place, harder still to witness what it was already becoming. For”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“Boundaries were strange to begin with—what belonged to who, and who belonged to where—all of these imaginary things treated as concrete so that our lives were governed by nonsense.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“There comes a point in life when all there is is remembering. A life is nothing but the sum of its yesterdays.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“Life was for the living and death was for the dead, and there was enough beauty and grace in both to mend the most tender and broken.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“If he ever wanted to move forward, if he ever wanted to be truly happy, he could not continue to dwell on what was. Happiness was not a passive thing. Joy so often required pursuit.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“That was the escapist cure for systemic poverty, the result of putting profit margins ahead of people for two hundred years. And when it all boiled down, that was the root cause of it all.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“It had never been that addicts didn’t care whether they lived or died, it was that the feeling you were chasing rested right against the brink and sometimes you just fell over.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“When the days grow shallow, there are only the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we’ve loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us, and the voices we hear when we too come to pass.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“What he’d feared was that moving forward would be a matter of forgetting, and if he forgot her it would be as if she’d never lived at all. But what he now realized was that there would never come a moment in his life when he would not remember. What he had truly forgotten was the simplicity that had made their life together so beautiful.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“No matter how strong a man was, there were moments in life that left him empty, things that could hollow his heart like a cavern in little more than an instant.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn

“A dog gets on a scent and there’s no turning back, and in that way dogs and men aren’t that different.”
― David Joy, When These Mountains Burn