Alden Bell Quotes & Sayings

He looks like someone who could slap you or kiss you and you wouldn't be able to tell which one is coming and it would mean the same thing either way. — Alden Bell

It has become something to her, that memory - something she can take out in dismal times and stare into like a crystal ball disclosing not presages but reminders. She holds it in her palm like a captured ladybug and thinks, Well ain't I been some places, ain't I partook in some glorious happenings wanderin my way between heaven and earth. And if I ain't seen everything there is to see, it wasn't for lack of lookin.
Blind is the real dead. — Alden Bell

It makes people feel good to build somethin big. Makes people feel like they're makin progress, I reckon.
Progress toward what?
It doesn't matter. Up higher or down deeper or out farther. As long as you're movin, it don't matter much where you're goin or what's chasin you. That's why they call it progress. It keeps goin of it's own accord. — Alden Bell

You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it's biscuits and model ships and the next minute it's outrage and horror. — Alden Bell

Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing andfinds a sight that makes her hush
and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts ...
It's something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene
as though what she's looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs. — Alden Bell

All of a sudden, there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again.
It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all. — Alden Bell

In her own experience she's learned that happiness and sadness find their own level no matter what's biting you, mosquitoes or meatskins. — Alden Bell

She wonders how people can live this kind of life - trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be. — Alden Bell

She thinks of James Grierson. His Kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true. — Alden Bell

Beyond the pursuit of meaning and beyond good and evil too, she says. See, it's a daily chore tryin to do the right thing. Not because the right thing is hard to do - it ain't. It's just cause the right thing - well, the right thing's got a way of eluding you. You give me a compass that tells good from bad, and boy I'll be a soldier of the righteous truth. But them two things are a slippery business, and tellin them apart might as well be a blind man's guess. — Alden Bell

She tells of moments when she would forget, when her own simmering evil would seem to dissipate and let through the clear spectacle of life. One had to be careful of those moments, because they were fleeting and intended not for her but instead for the delectation of other children of God. Or, if they were meant for her, they could break her heart as easily as mend it ... — Alden Bell

To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute.
There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth
and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences. — Alden Bell

I bet I got places to go that I don't even know exist yet. — Alden Bell

He was here once before but that was in a different lifetime, when wonders were rare and announced - like amusement parks or school trips.
Now they are everywhere, for the delectation of those among the survivors who might be hunters of miracles.
And the beauty he looks over is fathomable only by a girl who would have felt the measure of it as deep as to her dazzled soul. — Alden Bell

Your life ain't a target for the world to shoot at. The world is a target for your life to shoot at. — Alden Bell

And she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind. — Alden Bell

The abundance of small things, it'll bury you. — Alden Bell

They belong, Temple thinks. They have the stink of belonging wherever they go. This world is their world, and they take possession of every yard they cover, and they run the sun to its grave every night. — Alden Bell

He looks again at the face of the little girl. He wonders where she went, that little firecracker life, that smoldering, spitting, whizgig of a girl. He wonders if he can tell from the expression on her face where she's gone to.
And he smiles because he can.
The angels would want her sure. — Alden Bell

Words have the power to make things true if they're said right. — Alden Bell

Hey, girl. You awake over there?"
"Yeah, I'm awake."
Just this seems to satisfy him for a minute. Confirmation of awakeness, the fraternity of insomniacs. — Alden Bell

You can't put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It's like a dang vocation with them — Alden Bell

Some people, he says, they hide themselves away from the eyes of the world. They hunker down and shiver. They find four walls high enough to put between them and everything else. Those people, to them the world is a frightful place. See, you and me, we're different. When we are called on to move, we move. It don't matter the cause or the distance. Revenge or ministration, reason or folly - it's all the same to us. — Alden Bell

[Zombies] don't bother much as long as you can stay out from between their teeth. — Alden Bell

She leaves him sitting there, glancing back just once before she goes through the stairwell door and observing how the cloud of smoke from his cigar gets pulled in wisps out the dark gaping hole in the glass wall
as though it is his soul, too large for his massive frame and seeping out the pores of his skin and wandering circuitous back into the wilderness where it knows itself true among the violent and the dead. — Alden Bell

What I mean is I done some things I don't care to talk about. Little sister, anyone alive's got a collection of those things. Maybe so, but it's one thing to feel like there's a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it's another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of. — Alden Bell

Blind is the real dead. — Alden Bell

Dying is Easy , its Living that's hard — Alden Bell

It don't matter, she says. It just comes from thinkin too much. That's why you can't slow down for long. You gotta keep your brain tired out so it don't start searching for things to dwell on. — Alden Bell

America having changed to benefit them, their accounts suddenly cleared, they reverted to the only actions that still seemed mercenary in this topsy-turvy landscape: They rode the countryside like desperadoes, helping people. — Alden Bell

It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it's the doin it that counts. It's something. You draw imaginary lines. That's what you do.
The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.
Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.
And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:
Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there. — Alden Bell

Evil's a thing of the mind. We humans got the full measure of it ourselves.
Is that right? Are you evil, Sarah Mary?
I ain't good. — Alden Bell

I think maybe I was just waitin on the apocalypse so I would have something to occupy me. — Alden Bell

But still and all, you can cherish a miracle without deserving one. We're all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all. — Alden Bell

Richard Grierson smiles, but it's an inward-pointing smile, a smile of someone folding himself back up for storage in the colorful corners of his own crayon fantasies. She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin film of sawdust, and she looks at the toy ships built for imaginary journeys along the red dotted lines of a child's map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild dreams and imaginings along with her own - but there's something about them that make them feel like the saddest thing she's ever seen. — Alden Bell

Not all the magic of earth is benevolent. — Alden Bell

There are some things she doesn't like to think about because thinking about them takes up every part of her mind and body. — Alden Bell

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing. — Alden Bell

Honey, she says, honest ain't the half of what I'm not. — Alden Bell

Sometimes you gotta bust apart to get yourself put back together. — Alden Bell

Everyone's always tryin to find an entrance to the kingdom of heaven, she says. Me, I ain't so interested in entrances. All I want's a kingdom of exits. — Alden Bell

It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much. — Alden Bell

God is a slick god. Temple Knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe. — Alden Bell

A noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories-it feels like she's back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can't, because they're just memories and they're set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she just has to watch herself do the same things over and over and it's a condemnation if it's anything. — Alden Bell

She's done things that mark her forever, as good as a brand on her forehead - and her denial of them would be fruitless. It would be vanity. — Alden Bell

The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you're not fightin against it. — Alden Bell

He nods, his eyes on her like he's reading a book he's just getting to the end of and can't be interrupted. — Alden Bell

Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she's not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn't want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners. — Alden Bell

You somehow make it outta here and track me down, you best come with a furious rage
because I got no use for your sympathy. — Alden Bell

Niagara. Used to be a place honeymooners would go. Maybe you seen some movies. All this water, pouring over the cliffs, a thousand rivers falling down all at once, like somehow there was a mistake in the crust of the earth and someone had taken away half of a lakebed. And the force of it, water against water, so strong you can feel the spray on your cheeks a half a mile distant. I never seen anything like it. See, that's the kind of thing that just keeps on going, century after century, no matter what us puny humans are doin all a-scurry over the surface of the earth. — Alden Bell