The Rider on the Bridge Quotes

“Perhaps, like me, they found shelter in unfulfilled suburban pipedreams. And perhaps they mourned for the summer, felt the press of age, the ache of a world that barely turned and was not cruel or kind, but indifferent.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“That psychologist wanted me to come back and see him and the psychiatrist wanted to help my scrambled thoughts, but these people, they're just priests of the new religion. Every unpalatable thought and inconclusive experience is a catastrophe to be treated. They hear confession and then offer salvation and sacraments in the form of labels and pills.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“They hadn't left me, I concluded, hadn't acted against me. Rather, they had survived in a world that had left them to fend for themselves. I couldn't be angry. I could only miss them, mourn for them.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“The wilderness was dangerous; it infected me. I would be forever unmoored, inured to the safety of isolation.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“I waited in the kitchen and watched as a bright morning sun swept through the rooms. It would briefly catch on the part of the window that was not filthy, or a patch of carpet near the trim that had not been trampled by decades of stomping feet, and these things were transformed as if in some Cinderella story; dust particles shone like shooting stars caught in an upstream. I wanted to catch that light, to be purified in it and become a better version of myself.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“Courage and heroism are words for people who believe in good and evil as innate and clear forces.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“We were all going to die. There was no way out. We fluttered like drowning moths.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“We were all going to do. There was no way out. We fluttered like drowning moths.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“It was only much later that I understood what had happened to them more thoroughly; and how the demoralising complications and compromises in their young lives ravaged their relationship. When they first left home, they do so together; they must have taken care of each other. Maybe they had an idea, halfway formed, that was going to make everything okay again; but it died, and now they had to carry it around and maybe it would be that way forever.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“You know there's a finite number of atoms, subatomic particles.' He turned his head towards me, knowing it was a language I wouldn't understand. 'Everything transforms into something else, so maybe, someday, it come back.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“Still, on frostbitten mornings, under the sheen of a slithering mist, as I stood on the balcony, there was also a relief to be found in the wilderness that obscured us from the world and its revulsions.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“The days were shorter, meek and barren. It rained constantly, as if to signal the grave beginnings of a ritual, and we, as the last members of the tribe, did not know how to separate the profane from the sacred.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“It was the first time I had ever seen the ocean and it did not appear as formidable and indestructible as I thought it would. The wooden pier that had been thrust through the water, the oil tankers on the horizon, were all so dull. There was nothing special or unknown underneath those waters, no crashing waves, no wise currents, no deep blue; only a sulphuric stink mixed with a faint fishy ammonia that was thrown around by a hacking gust.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“The spongey-chinned Vice Principal told me high school was about separating wheat from chaff. He repeated the phrase as often as he could and he liked to say it as if it were a truth, one originating exclusively from him.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“It is a good story, although I cannot say it is true. Like most stories I suppose there is some truth in it, but the absence of truth does not diminish the story, does it?”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge