Quotes by Alan Heathcock

No matter what you say, or how much you talk, someone isn’t really forgiven until you can stand beside them without wanting to slap them in the face.

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don’t trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

You think some are bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they were someones baby, suckling the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in em and they aint the same no more.

...Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadnt begun that way, was nothing shed planned, but now she saw thats how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I dont want this. I aint the one to make the world right.

Laws on killing, even Gods demands, didnt allow for peace. Not always. Thered still be pain; missing that child would break her parents hearts. But what Helen knew, what shed seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.

Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.

The projectors beam lay warm on Walts neck, and he knew theyd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.