Above Excellent Quotes #27

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

This quote, taken from William Maxwell’s astonishing novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, stuck out to me as the most powerful quote from — without a doubt — the most powerful novel I have read in quite some time. A beautifully sorrowful and nostalgic book about childhood, at only one hundred and thirty-something pages long, I would urge everyone to read it if they get the chance.

Above Excellent Quotes #26

I turned around again and started shooting gooks. They were blowing holes through the wires with bangalor torpedoes. A man I took to be one of our own jumped into the trench and jabbed Gerber in the back with a bayonet. Singh saw it happening as I did and reached up on top of the trench where he had set his .45, picked it up, turned, and fired the gun in the man’s face. Because the man was wearing a helmet, the concussive effect of the round blew his face away. Gerber was lucky. He was wearing his flak jacket and the soldier had only made an arm thrust with the bayonet. If he had followed through with a full body thrust, he could have buried it into the hilt.

An absolutely captivating passage from Thom Jones’ story, ‘Break On Through’, taken from his first collection of short stories, The Pugilist at Rest. The scenes in the book which depict the madness and destruction of the Vietnam War, as this story does, are compelling and unforgettable. I highly recommend getting yourself a copy.