That kind of love wasn’t for anyone outside the two of them. It was private and silent, sufficient as grace.

Says an awful lot about a country that’d rather cut a man a disability check than fix him up so he can go find a job.

For as tough as the men were in these mountains, the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world.

There wasn’t any way out of that darkness but forward.

There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.

Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.

The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface’s roiling a reflection of what’s buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden.

What I’m saying is that it’s easy to take the high road so long as there aren’t any stakes. But the minute you’ve got something to lose, a man’ll do all sorts of things.

Light never shined on a man like me and that was certain. In a lot of ways, that made men like Daddy the lucky ones to have only ever known the darkness. Knowing only darkness, a man doesn’t have to get his heart broken in search of the light. I envied him for that.

There are some things worth dying for and some things worth killing for and some things that could make a man do all sorts of things he never knew he was capable of until the time came to do them.