Kent Haruf Quotes & Sayings

And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable. — Kent Haruf

It was surprising to him, how quickly she could fall asleep. — Kent Haruf

This boy needs a dog.
What makes you say that?
He needs someone or something to play with besides his phone and an old man and an old woman doddering around. — Kent Haruf

quit trying to fix things and we settled into our long polite and quiet life. — Kent Haruf

This don't look like no Sunday school church meeting to me. — Kent Haruf

This country's crazy in terms of fame and what people think it means. They expect a writer to be something between a Hollywood starlet and the village idiot. — Kent Haruf

People do. But, Daddy, it's not right. I didn't know you even cared for Addie Moore. Or even knew her that well. You're right. I didn't. But that's the main point of this being a good time. Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you're not just all dried up after all. It just seems embarrassing. To whom? It's not to me. But people know about you. Of course they do. And I don't give a damn. Who told you? It must've been one of your tightass friends in town here. It was Linda Rogers. She would. Well, she thought I should know. And now you do. — Kent Haruf

But we didn't know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we'd grown up with. — Kent Haruf

Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. I would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I'm so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it. — Kent Haruf

I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It's a strange life. I don't know how long it'll go on. I don't look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales. — Kent Haruf

gate at the chain-link fence — Kent Haruf

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book. — Kent Haruf

Oh I feel better already talking with you here next to me. — Kent Haruf

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. — Kent Haruf

That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her. And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards. — Kent Haruf

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing. — Kent Haruf

I made up my mind I'm not going to pay attention to what people think. I've done that too long - all my life. I'm not going to live that way anymore. — Kent Haruf

In terms of showing their emotions and acting on them, my women characters are a lot more advanced than the men. — Kent Haruf

My desire is to be anonymous, isolated, quiet, peaceful, and concentrated. — Kent Haruf

Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become. — Kent Haruf

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41. — Kent Haruf

FORTY YEARS AGO, — Kent Haruf

Addie Moore had a grandson named Jamie who was just turning six. In the early summer the trouble between his parents got worse. There were bad arguments in the kitchen and bedroom, accusations and recriminations, her tears and his shouts. They finally separated on a trial basis and she went off to California to stay with a friend, leaving Jamie with his father. He called Addie and told her what happened, that his wife had quit her job as a hairdresser and had gone out to the West Coast. — Kent Haruf

I heard he was disciplined by the church for supporting some other preacher who came out homosexual in Denver. I believe it was something of that nature. — Kent Haruf

A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose. — Kent Haruf

The precious ordinary. I — Kent Haruf

Where are you?
You mean where in the house?
Are you in your bedroom?
Yes, I've been reading. Is this some kind of phone sex?
It's just two old people talking in the dark, Addie said. — Kent Haruf

Our Souls at Night open onto larger insights about getting older? — Kent Haruf

You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that. — Kent Haruf

Well, I'm just going to say it.
I'm listening, Louis said.
I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me. — Kent Haruf

It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before. — Kent Haruf

I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before. — Kent Haruf

Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns. — Kent Haruf

I'm attempting to broaden my novels' scope through landscape and weather, leaves falling off trees, overnight storms, timeless elements which, irrespective of human endeavour, have always been there and, as long as there is life and snow, will always be there. — Kent Haruf

Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies. — Kent Haruf

Oh, I know it sounds crazy, she said. I suppose it is crazy. I don't know. I don't even care. But that girl needs somebody and I'm ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you - she smiled at them - you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It's too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance. — Kent Haruf

So life hasn't turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected,' he said.
'Except it feels good now, at this moment. — Kent Haruf

You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence. — Kent Haruf

People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. Bid hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary. — Kent Haruf

You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. — Kent Haruf

Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we'd still have something like this. That it turns out we're not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit. — Kent Haruf

Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn't known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feeling about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God. — Kent Haruf

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings. — Kent Haruf

He lay still for a while, alone in the silent house, remembering the night before, what that had been like, wondering what might be starting. Thinking did he want it to start, and what if he did. Late in the afternoon he called her. You doing all right? he said. Yes, aren't you? Yes, I am. Good. I enjoyed myself, he said. You think you'd like to get together again sometime? You're not suggesting an actual date, are you? Maggie said. In broad daylight? I don't know what you'd call it, Guthrie said. I'm just saying I'd be willing to take you out for supper at Shattuck's and invest in a hamburger. To see how that would go down. When were you thinking of doing that? Right now. This evening. Give me fifteen minutes to get ready, she said. He hung up and went upstairs and put on a clean shirt and entered the bathroom and brushed his teeth and combed his hair. He looked at himself in the mirror. You don't deserve it, he said aloud. Don't ever even begin to think that you do. — Kent Haruf

Love is the most important part of life, isn't it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don't understand and forgive what you don't know or don't like. Love is all. Love is patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering. I hope you may love each other all your days of life together. And I hope you may have a great many years of those days. — Kent Haruf

This one time he come in and he says how you doing, and I says oh not too good, I got something on my mind, some people upsetting me. And he says who is it, you want me to take care of them, and I says oh no, that's all right, I'll take crae of things, because I knew what he'd do or have somebody else do for him. They'd wake up with their throats cut, is what I'm talking about. Well, he come out of San Luis Valley. You didn't want to fool with him. — Kent Haruf

They don't come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the old important ones. They want to hear what they've been told before, with only some small variation on what they've been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied. But — Kent Haruf

Fame isn't healthy for a writer. — Kent Haruf

When he reached the wire gate he stopped and stood looking back toward the horse barn and the cow lots. Then he raised his head and peered up at the stars. He spoke aloud. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. You dumb old ignorant stupid son of a bitch. Then — Kent Haruf

You're going to mess this up, do you know that? You don't even see what's in front of you. You're like everybody else.
No, I'm not.
You're dreaming backward. — Kent Haruf

After finishing the first draft, I work for as long as it takes (for two or three weeks, most often) to rework that first draft on a computer. Usually that involves expansion: filling in and adding to, but trying not to lose the spontaneous, direct sound. I use that first draft as a touchstone to make sure everything else in that section has the same sound, the same tone and impression of spontaneity. — Kent Haruf

Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are. — Kent Haruf

Yes. He told me things. Like what for instance? Like once he said I had beautiful eyes. He said my eyes were like black diamonds lit up on a starry night. They are, honey. But nobody ever told me. No, Maggie said. They never do. — Kent Haruf

We'd do better to follow the admonition of Jesus about loving our neighbours. People in the U.S. are capable of forgiveness and willing to see one another's point of view, but when matters become politicised, we're less able to do that. — Kent Haruf

Sins of omission, Louis said.
You don't believe in sins.
I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That's a sin. — Kent Haruf

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark. — Kent Haruf

I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit. — Kent Haruf

But listen to me, she said. What. You don't actually think I'm scary, do you? Yeah, I do. Tell me the truth. I'm serious now. That is the truth. At times I can't say I know what to make of you. Can't you? No. What do you mean? Why not? Because you're different than everybody else, he said. You don't seem to ever get defeated or scared by life. You stay clear in yourself, no matter what. She kissed him. Her dark eyes were watching him in the dim light. I get defeated sometimes, she said. I've been scared. But I'm just crazy about you. She reached down and touched him. Here's one part of you that seems to know what to make of me. You do make a person feel interested, said Guthrie. — Kent Haruf

I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write. — Kent Haruf

I think that usually the risk in trying to write children in fiction is the tendency to make them too cute or something. — Kent Haruf

This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic. — Kent Haruf

You have been good for me. What more could anyone ask for? I'm a better person than I was before we got together. That's your doing. — Kent Haruf