Peter Heller Quotes & Sayings

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow. — Peter Heller

Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. — Peter Heller

What it is about painting, how it can hit people exactly like music, and hit people so differently. — Peter Heller

Once he said: I'm a time bomb. Which he didn't have to tell me. — Peter Heller

Can you fall in love through a rifle scope? — Peter Heller

I want to be two people at once. One runs away. — Peter Heller

Seem to float magically above the trenches of commerce, — Peter Heller

He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab. — Peter Heller

The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb, the dead never do ... — Peter Heller

Too - about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been. — Peter Heller

If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn't even stick around for it. Time present and time future. — Peter Heller

All the choices we can't see. Every moment. — Peter Heller

You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. — Peter Heller

Jasper. Little brother. My heart. — Peter Heller

Isn't that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love. It seems cruel, almost monstrous. I mean I can love a bug. I have watched a spider weaving her web in the evening, in the young alder branches along the river, and I have loved her. Truly. Or a small moth trying to beat her way off the water of a dark pool, her soaked wings stuck to the surface as if by glue. And gently slid a leaf beneath her and lifted her to the ground, praying that her wings would dry without damage. I've done that. And yet I could not love my wife. — Peter Heller

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End. — Peter Heller

Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence. — Peter Heller

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all. — Peter Heller

No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet. — Peter Heller

It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. Or being okay with it. — Peter Heller

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don't even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along. — Peter Heller

When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back. — Peter Heller

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life. — Peter Heller

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling. — Peter Heller

Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. — Peter Heller

She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting. — Peter Heller

At this stage they were killers. I mean this stage in our mutually culpable history. Who — Peter Heller

Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run. — Peter Heller

It's early spring, some late or early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life. — Peter Heller

Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how — Peter Heller

Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. — Peter Heller

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move. — Peter Heller

Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later. — Peter Heller

Hey where are the old stakes for the beans? Where did we put em? Jasper's ears came up and his mouth opened in his version of a smile. He didn't know. He didn't give a fuck. — Peter Heller

I never thought I would be a painter. That I might make a world and walk into it and forget myself. That art would be something I would not have any way of not doing. — Peter Heller

Funny how you can live your whole life waiting and not know it ... Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it. — Peter Heller

No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man. — Peter Heller

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her. — Peter Heller

The albatross hit the top and canted her soft belly to the storm, and made a screaming banked peel-out downwind and over the other side. I don't know if anyone else on the ship saw her. To me, she was a visitation. Not harbinger or annunciation, but a simple reminder of a wold that worked, that was at home with itself and friends with storm. — Peter Heller

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children's blocks. — Peter Heller

Anymore the old seasonal benchmarks were mostly nostalgia. We — Peter Heller

Desert trees that don't grow up but grow gnarled and thick. Stunted and stubborn. Remind me of Bangley. They just refuse to die at any price. Some — Peter Heller

In the November 2006 issue of Science, a report by an international team of scientists studying a vast amount of data gathered between 1950 and 2003 declared that if current trends of fishing and pollution continue, every fishery in the world's oceans will collapse by 2048 ... The oceans as an ecosystem would completely collapse. — Peter Heller

We have traveled.
Now you will be the path
I will walk I will walk
Over you. — Peter Heller

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it's killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues. — Peter Heller

Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back. — Peter Heller

I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you'd find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone ...
My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter
I love otter
Under a muskrat:
I love muskrat
Beaver:
I love beaver — Peter Heller

She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose. — Peter Heller

Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don't you think? If you don't melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you've really done something to crow about. — Peter Heller

I tried with every ounce not to, not to weep as I saw my world, everything in it of any importance, vanishing from my grip. In — Peter Heller

I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse. — Peter Heller

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting. — Peter Heller

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him. — Peter Heller

Dusk was moving over the water with a stillness that turned half the world to glass. The wall of mountains had gone to shadow as had the reflections at their feet. In the stillness the rings of rising trout appeared like raindrops. Slowly, in silence, the dark water tilted away from the remaining daylight. — Peter Heller

He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks. — Peter Heller

We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed to a force much greater than themselves, which in this case is the wave, and submitted to the gnarly rigors of its discipline. They have allowed themselves to be shaped and polished by the sea. They have given themselves up to this greater force, day after day, year after year. Crushed and punished, battered into something tempered and resilient, and sharpened to an edge by constant refinement. They are warriors in the best sense: by bending to the often brutal demands of surfing they have transformed themselves into beings who can respond to great violence with grace and humility. And beauty. — Peter Heller

So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn't have TV. — Peter Heller

Still. No resolution ever. None. Nothing decided, nothing finished. The Dipper wheels back into place. Just one turn. One turn of the wheel and we are different, never the same. Not ever. Not even those stars. Even they, they decay, collapse, coalesce, break apart. Close my eyes. — Peter Heller

She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole. — Peter Heller

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything. — Peter Heller

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious. — Peter Heller

It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace. — Peter Heller

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you.
When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing. — Peter Heller

I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world. — Peter Heller

Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. (244) — Peter Heller

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. — Peter Heller

What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It's harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person. — Peter Heller

You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been. — Peter Heller

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later? — Peter Heller

It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over. — Peter Heller

Waiting. Time in its pod. Blown open and scattered. — Peter Heller

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets? — Peter Heller

What a fool. In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I — Peter Heller

Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it. — Peter Heller

The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato. Like my heart swelled and my skin got thinner and thinner in the heat of it. Of company. — Peter Heller

The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness. — Peter Heller

I figured in the fuel, the guns, two rifles, the shotgun, the handguns, four grenades. Period. Two quarts of oil. I scratched a nub of pencil — Peter Heller

Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn't mind, I was feeling flush. — Peter Heller

Ve used for years. When the rubber wears out I've got more. On the last — Peter Heller

One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary really. — Peter Heller

Nothing decided, nothing finished. — Peter Heller

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. — Peter Heller

What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead. — Peter Heller

Well, I think that's sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it's like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death. — Peter Heller

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying? — Peter Heller

Is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him. CAWWREAACHH. — Peter Heller

Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys-- of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain. — Peter Heller

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep. — Peter Heller

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps — Peter Heller

Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it. — Peter Heller

Referring to sheep experiencing a plane takeoff - As far as they knew, all this represented the next stage in the normal life cycle of a sheep — Peter Heller

I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.
This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears. — Peter Heller

This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn't all it's cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is
well you can't even look at it. — Peter Heller

Because at night there is a comfort in moving darkly. In slipping through, shadow to shadow. Can't say why. Maybe because we were hunters, all of us. The way a cat moves in the shadows. Or a wolf. The instinctive safety in that. — Peter Heller

Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved as much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain. Who knew what attack, what illness. That doubleness again. Like flying: the stillness and speed, serenity and danger. — Peter Heller

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. — Peter Heller

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious? — Peter Heller

She was very easy to please, because she took joy in the smallest things, but exacting, too, because that small thing must be authentic, and wondrous in its small self, and not any kind of bullshit. She could detect bullshit from a hillside away. But then she took people at face value and expected the best of them until proven otherwise. — Peter Heller

Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment. — Peter Heller

I was not allowed to bury her. She was incinerated with the rest. I — Peter Heller