So Brave, Young, and Handsome

I have read a lot of books since I got to China.  Maybe another time I'll post about what the books are (sort of like how I am still planning to post about my team at some point...) but here are some of my favorite quotes from one of them.  My mom just blogged about her favorite quotes from Peace Like a River, these were my favorites from Leif Enger's other novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome.

Brushing crumbs from our hands we stepped down to the river.

He said, "You'd best know I am unreliable, that I am a poor friend."

"A poor friend is better than none," I replied.

There we stayed in the breathless night.  

Love is a strange fact -- 

it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. 

It makes no sense at all.

...violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.

I think often of Celia Davies.  

She could squeeze a conversation to its rind, 

leap it east to west, or change its axis wholly.  

Her wits were as supple as her fingers were rigid. 

 I don't know her story, 

for she was an adept evader of questions, 

but her life would be a giddy crossword, 

working down from some clues and across from others.

He was talking -- praying, it turned out, 

though I couldn't tell at first 

since he didn't speak in the fraught inflections common to prayer, 

at least my own.  

It was more as if he was relating to a good listener the details of his day.

I asked the question that occurred to me:  

"Why does she have no  money?"

Glendon lifted his head and looked at me in wonder.  

"That don't matter.  Why don't matter.  Isn't that clear to you yet?"

But it wasn't clear.  I was not always a man to grasp the obvious.

For a long time I could do nothing 

but stand looking at the dust pluming in that merciless sun,

 and mourn my young friend.  

It's said grief is more easily borne in company -- 

well, I didn't want to bear it easily.

Say what you like about melodrama, 

it beats confusion.  

The truth is we ought [to] have a chance to say a little something when it's getting dark.  

We ought to have a closing scene.

"You are also different," she said.

I didn't try to explain that.  

You can't explain grace, anyway, 

especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. 

I didn't even ask for it, 

yet somehow it breached and began to work.  

I suppose grace was pouring over Glendon, 

who had sought it so hard, 

and some had spilled down on me.