Peter Heller Quotes

#1. Why was I so hung up on anyone being brave? So what if 90 percent of artists, or people for that matter, were meek?

Peter Heller

#2. She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

Peter Heller

#3. Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day.

Peter Heller

#4. So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV.

Peter Heller

#5. What a fool. In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I

Peter Heller

#6. Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it.

Peter Heller

#7. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how

Peter Heller

#8. Desert trees that don't grow up but grow gnarled and thick. Stunted and stubborn. Remind me of Bangley. They just refuse to die at any price. Some

Peter Heller

#9. I once had a book on the stars but now I don't. My memory serves but not stellar, ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about.

Peter Heller

#10. Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. (244)

Peter Heller

#11. Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps

Peter Heller

#12. I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

Peter Heller

#13. felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not

Peter Heller

#14. Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not know it ... Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it.

Peter Heller

#15. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

Peter Heller

#16. So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

Peter Heller

#17. I tried with every ounce not to, not to weep as I saw my world, everything in it of any importance, vanishing from my grip. In

Peter Heller

#18. I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.

Peter Heller

#19. What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently.

Peter Heller

#20. Too - about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been.

Peter Heller

#21. Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

Peter Heller

#22. At this stage they were killers. I mean this stage in our mutually culpable history. Who

Peter Heller

#23. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement.

Peter Heller

#24. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

Peter Heller

#25. Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don't think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.

Peter Heller

#26. Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don't you think? If you don't melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you've really done something to crow about.

Peter Heller

#27. The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb, the dead never do ...

Peter Heller

#28. I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse.

Peter Heller

#29. Waiting. Time in its pod. Blown open and scattered.

Peter Heller

#30. It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

Peter Heller

#31. She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.

Peter Heller

#32. Once he said: I'm a time bomb. Which he didn't have to tell me.

Peter Heller

#33. Anymore the old seasonal benchmarks were mostly nostalgia. We

Peter Heller

#34. Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run.

Peter Heller

#35. I was not allowed to bury her. She was incinerated with the rest. I

Peter Heller

#36. I figured in the fuel, the guns, two rifles, the shotgun, the handguns, four grenades. Period. Two quarts of oil. I scratched a nub of pencil

Peter Heller

#37. Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn't mind, I was feeling flush.

Peter Heller

#38. I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

Peter Heller

#39. If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn't even stick around for it. Time present and time future.

Peter Heller

#40. She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

Peter Heller

#41. Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

Peter Heller

#42. We can proceed in our lives just as easily from love to love as from loss to loss. A good thing to remember in the middle of the night when you're not sure how you will get through the next three breaths.

Peter Heller

#43. Seem to float magically above the trenches of commerce,

Peter Heller

#44. Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment.

Peter Heller

#45. You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace.

Peter Heller

#46. Can you fall in love through a rifle scope?

Peter Heller

#47. Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later.

Peter Heller

#48. There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

Peter Heller

#49. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

Peter Heller

#50. What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It's harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.

Peter Heller

#51. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.

Peter Heller

#52. The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children's blocks.

Peter Heller

#53. Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.

Peter Heller

#54. Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.

Peter Heller

#55. Sometimes I think that's all you need. A good man with a fishing tip, a wave. A woman once in a while. Some work to do that might mean something. A truck that runs, that some faceless bastard two hundred miles away can't turn off. It's not much, but plenty when you don't have any of it.

Peter Heller

#56. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.

Peter Heller

#57. Referring to sheep experiencing a plane takeoff - As far as they knew, all this represented the next stage in the normal life cycle of a sheep

Peter Heller

#58. It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it.

Peter Heller

#59. It's early spring, some late or early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

Peter Heller

#60. Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.

Peter Heller

#61. the End of Everything meant the End maybe for all time, maybe in all the universe, of Golf.

Peter Heller

#62. She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

Peter Heller

#63. Nothing decided, nothing finished.

Peter Heller

#64. How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don't even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

Peter Heller

#65. He's getting old. I don't count the years. I don't multiply by seven. They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn't they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

Peter Heller

#66. I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.

Peter Heller

#67. If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

Peter Heller

#68. we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The

Peter Heller

#69. Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

Peter Heller

#70. I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing.

Peter Heller

#71. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful.

Peter Heller

#72. When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

Peter Heller

#73. Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

Peter Heller

#74. Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

Peter Heller

#75. Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

Peter Heller

#76. I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

Peter Heller

#77. Dont pretend to be that small, you are not that great!

Peter Heller

#78. Well, I think that's sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it's like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death.

Peter Heller

#79. Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys-- of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain.

Peter Heller

#80. We have traveled.
Now you will be the path
I will walk I will walk
Over you.

Peter Heller

#81. She must have been freezing, and it filled Pete with gratitude for the no-bullshit people of the earth, the people who knew what had to be done and would find their own damn coat later.

Peter Heller

#82. To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Peter Heller

#83. The other is how I could have loved Cristine so fiercely, who was such a world champion bitch, who even came after me once with a kitchen knife.

Peter Heller

#84. Ve used for years. When the rubber wears out I've got more. On the last

Peter Heller

#85. One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary really.

Peter Heller

#86. Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can't say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that.

Peter Heller

#87. Is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him. CAWWREAACHH.

Peter Heller

#88. The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I

Peter Heller

#89. That this was once the middle of nowhere and now it's not even that.

Peter Heller

#90. The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

Peter Heller

#91. It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

Peter Heller

#92. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

Peter Heller

#93. Still. No resolution ever. None. Nothing decided, nothing finished. The Dipper wheels back into place. Just one turn. One turn of the wheel and we are different, never the same. Not ever. Not even those stars. Even they, they decay, collapse, coalesce, break apart. Close my eyes.

Peter Heller

#94. Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back.

Peter Heller

#95. He really your dad? Yes. On my father's side.

Peter Heller

#96. He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.

Peter Heller

#97. No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man.

Peter Heller

#98. Hey where are the old stakes for the beans? Where did we put em? Jasper's ears came up and his mouth opened in his version of a smile. He didn't know. He didn't give a fuck.

Peter Heller

#99. All the choices we can't see. Every moment.

Peter Heller

#100. No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

Peter Heller