Top 51 Kent Haruf Quotes
#1. I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.
Kent Haruf
#3. Yes. He told me things. Like what for instance? Like once he said I had beautiful eyes. He said my eyes were like black diamonds lit up on a starry night. They are, honey. But nobody ever told me. No, Maggie said. They never do.
Kent Haruf
#4. I'm attempting to broaden my novels' scope through landscape and weather, leaves falling off trees, overnight storms, timeless elements which, irrespective of human endeavour, have always been there and, as long as there is life and snow, will always be there.
Kent Haruf
#5. We'd do better to follow the admonition of Jesus about loving our neighbours. People in the U.S. are capable of forgiveness and willing to see one another's point of view, but when matters become politicised, we're less able to do that.
Kent Haruf
#6. Sins of omission, Louis said.
You don't believe in sins.
I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That's a sin.
Kent Haruf
#7. I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.
Kent Haruf
#8. I think that usually the risk in trying to write children in fiction is the tendency to make them too cute or something.
Kent Haruf
#9. This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.
Kent Haruf
#10. You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence.
Kent Haruf
#11. Our Souls at Night open onto larger insights about getting older?
Kent Haruf
#12. Where are you?
You mean where in the house?
Are you in your bedroom?
Yes, I've been reading. Is this some kind of phone sex?
It's just two old people talking in the dark, Addie said.
Kent Haruf
#13. A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.
Kent Haruf
#14. In terms of showing their emotions and acting on them, my women characters are a lot more advanced than the men.
Kent Haruf
#16. Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.
Kent Haruf
#17. So life hasn't turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected,' he said.
'Except it feels good now, at this moment.
Kent Haruf
#18. I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.
Kent Haruf
#19. I heard he was disciplined by the church for supporting some other preacher who came out homosexual in Denver. I believe it was something of that nature.
Kent Haruf
#20. People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. Bid hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary.
Kent Haruf
#21. Well, I'm just going to say it.
I'm listening, Louis said.
I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.
Kent Haruf
#22. quit trying to fix things and we settled into our long polite and quiet life.
Kent Haruf
#23. Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. I would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I'm so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it.
Kent Haruf
#24. You have been good for me. What more could anyone ask for? I'm a better person than I was before we got together. That's your doing.
Kent Haruf
#25. You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.
Kent Haruf
#26. He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.
Kent Haruf
#27. You're going to mess this up, do you know that? You don't even see what's in front of you. You're like everybody else.
No, I'm not.
You're dreaming backward.
Kent Haruf
#29. Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
Kent Haruf
#30. Oh I feel better already talking with you here next to me.
Kent Haruf
#31. You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.
Kent Haruf
#32. Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn't known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feeling about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.
Kent Haruf
#33. Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.
Kent Haruf
#34. Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are.
Kent Haruf
#35. This boy needs a dog.
What makes you say that?
He needs someone or something to play with besides his phone and an old man and an old woman doddering around.
Kent Haruf
#36. Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.
Kent Haruf
#38. I made up my mind I'm not going to pay attention to what people think. I've done that too long - all my life. I'm not going to live that way anymore.
Kent Haruf
#39. I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.
Kent Haruf
#40. When he reached the wire gate he stopped and stood looking back toward the horse barn and the cow lots. Then he raised his head and peered up at the stars. He spoke aloud. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. You dumb old ignorant stupid son of a bitch. Then
Kent Haruf
#41. I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.
Kent Haruf
#42. It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.
Kent Haruf
#43. It was surprising to him, how quickly she could fall asleep.
Kent Haruf
#44. Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we'd still have something like this. That it turns out we're not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.
Kent Haruf
#45. My desire is to be anonymous, isolated, quiet, peaceful, and concentrated.
Kent Haruf
#46. This don't look like no Sunday school church meeting to me.
Kent Haruf
#47. Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.
Kent Haruf
#48. But we didn't know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we'd grown up with.
Kent Haruf
#49. I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It's a strange life. I don't know how long it'll go on. I don't look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales.
Kent Haruf
#50. This country's crazy in terms of fame and what people think it means. They expect a writer to be something between a Hollywood starlet and the village idiot.
Kent Haruf
#51. And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.
Kent Haruf
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