Larry Watson Quotes

“Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one's breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won't warm- these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer.”

— Larry Watson

With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.

— Larry Watson

From the bluffs east of the city, Gladstone, Montana looks as though it could have been laid out by a shotgun blast, the commercial and residential districts a tight cluster in the center and then the buckshot dispersing in the looser pattern of outlying houses and businesses owned by those Montanans for whom space is a stronger article of faith than neighborliness.

— Larry Watson

“Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.”

— Larry Watson

“When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.”

— Larry Watson

“Now no sign, no scorch or char, marks the place where George built the fire. Remarkable, earth's strength to restore itself and erase human effort. But memory, stronger still, can send flames as high as the roof, and shift the wind and choke George and sting his eyes with smoke ...”

— Larry Watson

“Besides, I was right where I wanted to be, sitting at the long mahogany table, candlelit and covered for the occasion with a linen tablecloth, and set with”

— Larry Watson

“Where, incidentally, a holiday meal was not being served. My mother worked as a waitress at Palmer's Supper”

— Larry Watson

“The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong
who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?”

— Larry Watson

“The Cumberland Clinic could provide had to”

— Larry Watson

“Dr. Dunbar would never consider not answering the call of duty.”

— Larry Watson

“A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.”

— Larry Watson

From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them.

— Larry Watson

“Two months ago my mother died. She made, as the expression goes, a good death.”

— Larry Watson