Gerard Donovan Quotes & Sayings

The only test, Baker, is how not to erase ourselves from the map. Our history is that things don't last. Every generation creates the right monsters to destroy itself. — Gerard Donovan

I saw battles in their eyes long forgotten by many,and never known to some, and observed some of them fall with him into that hole in the ground, I mean the part of them that remembered the fear and the rubble of distant towns, or the part that had hoped for better things afterwards. The soldier who fights always hopes that way,my grandfather said, but its those who dont fight who get to decide what things will come — Gerard Donovan

The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ... — Gerard Donovan

I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer. — Gerard Donovan

The absence of someone comes like a new season, first only in pieces: you see the absence in them long before they leave. — Gerard Donovan

November arrives in Northern Maine on a cold wind from Canada that knives unfiltered through the thinnest forest, drapes snow along the river banks and over the slope of hills. It's lonely up here, not just in fall and winter but all the time; the weather is gray and hard and the spaces are long and hard, and that north wind blows through every space unmercifully, rattling the syllables out of your sentences sometimes. — Gerard Donovan

Some men must create pain in others to feel less of it themselves. — Gerard Donovan

If love leaves an echo, I said, she is still with me. — Gerard Donovan

The pink petals hung raw and shook with the cold and wind. How they hung on out of season, the struggle of it, the strength it took. Not long now, and they'd be brown stains on a stalk. — Gerard Donovan

I should have known that people can sometimes come close enough to discover that they are strangers. — Gerard Donovan

People usually choose the place they get lost in — Gerard Donovan

Outside I saw her sitting in the wheelchair, hands folded on her lap, and I knew I was living the moment that says nothing, that will allow nothing said of consequence. — Gerard Donovan

Also my with sadness, something else crept in the door, a trace of something else, I mean. It must have come from the woodpile or ran in from the woods, because I'd not felt anything like it before. — Gerard Donovan