76 Quotes by Edward Hoagland

What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own.

She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.

The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for...depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in "fooling around"--which was not to justify it--topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism.

Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.

God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him."Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way.""You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people.""Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.

The milking machines sounded tranquilizing, and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving, warming the barn with cud-chewing, nose-snuffling, and sisterly mammalhood.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep

Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer.

Often eating took considerable extra time, since he could hardly see his food, groping with a fork or spoon, enforcedly omnivorous. "Blind men wear spotted pants," Dorothy teased, telling him to wash his...