107 Quotes by Ron Rash

Do this one thing.

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That’s where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?

Nietzsche once said “that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” I didn’t believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate – and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness.

We had some good times at school. I didn’t know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that’s the way of it.

He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.

Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?

A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female’s caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.

You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender’s sole advantage.