122 Quotes by Peter Matthiessen

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism – those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined – how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as “homegoing,” a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging.

This world is painted on a wild dark metal.

In the gaunt, brown face in the mirror – unseen since late September – the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.

Man wants the truth about Ed Watson,” Daniels jeered. “Where you aim to find it? Smallwoods’ll tell you their truth, Hardens’ll tell you theirs. Fat-ass guard out there, he’ll tell you his and I’ll give you another. Which one you aim to settle for and make your peace with?

There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man’s wrong and each man’s right are different.