Alden Bell Quotes

#1. Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.

Alden Bell

#2. You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it's biscuits and model ships and the next minute it's outrage and horror.

Alden Bell

#3. You can't put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It's like a dang vocation with them

Alden Bell

#4. Evil's a thing of the mind. We humans got the full measure of it ourselves.
Is that right? Are you evil, Sarah Mary?
I ain't good.

Alden Bell

#5. The abundance of small things, it'll bury you.

Alden Bell

#6. Honey, she says, honest ain't the half of what I'm not.

Alden Bell

#7. Dying is Easy , its Living that's hard

Alden Bell

#8. I bet I got places to go that I don't even know exist yet.

Alden Bell

#9. She's done things that mark her forever, as good as a brand on her forehead - and her denial of them would be fruitless. It would be vanity.

Alden Bell

#10. They belong, Temple thinks. They have the stink of belonging wherever they go. This world is their world, and they take possession of every yard they cover, and they run the sun to its grave every night.

Alden Bell

#11. You somehow make it outta here and track me down, you best come with a furious rage
because I got no use for your sympathy.

Alden Bell

#12. Not all the magic of earth is benevolent.

Alden Bell

#13. He looks like someone who could slap you or kiss you and you wouldn't be able to tell which one is coming and it would mean the same thing either way.

Alden Bell

#14. It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.

Alden Bell

#15. I think maybe I was just waitin on the apocalypse so I would have something to occupy me.

Alden Bell

#16. And she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.

Alden Bell

#17. The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you're not fightin against it.

Alden Bell

#18. She thinks of James Grierson. His Kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true.

Alden Bell

#19. America having changed to benefit them, their accounts suddenly cleared, they reverted to the only actions that still seemed mercenary in this topsy-turvy landscape: They rode the countryside like desperadoes, helping people.

Alden Bell

#20. Your life ain't a target for the world to shoot at. The world is a target for your life to shoot at.

Alden Bell

#21. Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she's not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn't want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners.

Alden Bell

#22. Hey, girl. You awake over there?"
"Yeah, I'm awake."
Just this seems to satisfy him for a minute. Confirmation of awakeness, the fraternity of insomniacs.

Alden Bell

#23. There are some things she doesn't like to think about because thinking about them takes up every part of her mind and body.

Alden Bell

#24. In her own experience she's learned that happiness and sadness find their own level no matter what's biting you, mosquitoes or meatskins.

Alden Bell

#25. He looks again at the face of the little girl. He wonders where she went, that little firecracker life, that smoldering, spitting, whizgig of a girl. He wonders if he can tell from the expression on her face where she's gone to.
And he smiles because he can.
The angels would want her sure.

Alden Bell

#26. It don't matter, she says. It just comes from thinkin too much. That's why you can't slow down for long. You gotta keep your brain tired out so it don't start searching for things to dwell on.

Alden Bell

#27. God is a slick god. Temple Knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.

Alden Bell

#28. But still and all, you can cherish a miracle without deserving one. We're all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all.

Alden Bell

#29. Blind is the real dead.

Alden Bell

#30. She wonders how people can live this kind of life - trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be.

Alden Bell

#31. Everyone's always tryin to find an entrance to the kingdom of heaven, she says. Me, I ain't so interested in entrances. All I want's a kingdom of exits.

Alden Bell

#32. Words have the power to make things true if they're said right.

Alden Bell

#33. He nods, his eyes on her like he's reading a book he's just getting to the end of and can't be interrupted.

Alden Bell

#34. [Zombies] don't bother much as long as you can stay out from between their teeth.

Alden Bell

#35. Sometimes you gotta bust apart to get yourself put back together.

Alden Bell