The Sweet Hereafter Quotes

#1. Glimpses is dead-on about the high and tight nineties even as it reaches out for the sweet hereafter of the sixties. It longs for something better, and finds it, I guess, as much as anything is ever found anymore. It's a mean, sweet, wry, and disturbing book, in equal portions.

Frederick Barthelme

#2. O sweet September, thy first breezes bring The dry leaf's rustle and the squirrel's laughter, The cool fresh air whence health and vigor spring And promise of exceeding joy hereafter.

George Arnold

#3. The only way I could go on living was to believe I was not living.

Russell Banks

#4. For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem.

Russell Banks

#5. I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts.

Russell Banks

#6. Obviously, you can't control everything, but you are obliged to take care of the few things you can. I'm an optimist, basically, who acts like a pessimist. On principle. Just in case.

Russell Banks

#7. Because it's anger that drives us and delivers us. It's not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

Russell Banks

#8. Listen, identify withe the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.

Russell Banks

#9. But I understood Bear Otto's desire to become a noble man, a man like Billy Ansel, and I respected that, naturally. I just wished the boy had more ways of imagining the thing than by becoming a good soldier. But that's boys, I guess.

Russell Banks

#10. He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.

John Fowles

#11. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.

Russell Banks

#12. Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.

Russell Banks

#13. I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred.

Russell Banks

#14. [ ... ] I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.

Russell Banks

#15. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.

Russell Banks

#16. Lord thank you for thy faithfulness.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#17. Angry? Yes, I'm angry: I'd be a lousy lawyer if I weren't.

Russell Banks

#18. The more I looked at people, the more I hated them.

Charles Starkweather

#19. It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.

Russell Banks

#20. It is good to hold the asse by the bridle.

George Herbert

#21. From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

Russell Banks

#22. It's a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I'm in charge here.

Russell Banks

#23. There are magnificent beings on this earth, son, that are walking around posing as humans.

Fannie Flagg