76 Quotes by Brian Doyle

But you cannot control everything... All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference... You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow... That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music;.

Somehow she lost her compass. Her engine failed. Her gyroscope broke. She’s... lost. She says the road she was on isn’t there any more and she doesn’t know where to walk now.

On a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth – clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin. Brown pelicans rise and fall in their chorus lines in the wells of the waves, cormorants arrow, an eagle kingly queenly floats south high above the water line.

You cannot edit your life, and even if I was today offered the chance to never meet her, and so not leave the city I loved, I would decline, for life is a verb, life swerves and lurches no matter how cautious and careful your driving, and I would not be who I am, surrounded by those I love most in this world, had I not left Chicago when I did.

Well the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we’ll never get to the bottom of either of them.

We sit on park benches and beaches and couches and hilltops, listening and dreaming seemingly to no particular purpose. But isn’t it often the case that when we cease to move and think, we see and hear and understand a great deal?

It’s wrong to say that animals do not feel what we feel; indeed, they may feel far more than we do and in far different emotional shades.

I am no heroic figure, but a man like any other, capable of selfish and selfless at once, of light and dark, courage and cravenness; all men are two men, always at war with each other, isn’t that so? We don masks, we perform parts, we adopt personas, but we are never one sort of man, and not another. Even the greatest among us knows this to be so; perhaps the wisest among us are those who admit it most easily.