Craig Davidson Quotes
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If a blind, three-legged racehorse named “Next Stop: Glue Factory” were racing down at the Fort Erie track, you can bet Lex Galbraith would’ve bet his life savings on the nose of that nag.
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How many seconds separate Jake or any of us from those burdens of fate? Three? Five? At some point in our lives, the cut may have been that fine. Who can say, and perhaps it is not worth pondering. But we do, don't we? We gnaw on that bone of possibility until our teeth are dull and our skulls throb. There are other life-lines than the one we landed on, and we can taste it.
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You and I are cobbled out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. We could have a carbon cell in one of our elbows that was once part of a trilobite's tail. Or a cell from Atilla the Hun's moustache in our eye. Or an ancient lotus petal in our tonsils.
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When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been engaged in a low wattage war someplace.
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Wealth hung awkwardly on some people, gave rise to perversions of taste and common sense: fad diets and Tae Bo and shit-in-milk-jug art exhibits. Some people were better off poor.
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For some of the kids on my bus, the deviation is so small: an imperfection in the DNA strand so tiny that an electron microscope cranked to 100,000X magnification shows but a shadow. A knot of rogue atoms. Weightless. A body forms itself around that anomaly, and next comes a life, and the lives of that person's family.
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Some creatures live as stars do: burn hard and hot, feeding on those nearby but primarily upon themselves. Their lives an inferno and them happiest in that heat. Eating away at themselves until all that remains is appetite.
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So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.
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You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else’s head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own.
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It boiled down to this: it’s a lot harder to love than to hate. Harder to be there for those you love – to see them get older, get sick, be taken from you in sudden awful ways. Hate’s dead simple. You can hate an utter stranger from a thousand miles away. It asks nothing of you. It eats you from the inside out but it takes no effort or thought at all.
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No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that’s just the way it goes.
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A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.
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They say a man can change his personality—the basic essence of who or what he is—by five percent. Five percent: the total change any one of us is capable of.
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Love is a sickness. Some kind of a pathogen existing above all explanation.
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How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and hope it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we'd rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.
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I stood in the hallway, unable to offer my uncle any comfort for his wretched need. I understand now that I was just a kid, at that stage where we’re good at forcing others to deal with our own outbursts but less adept when dealing with the painful emotions of others. I had no idea how to help, and . . . and I was so scared.
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It had struck me that most people‘s lives unfolded through a constant process of recalibration. Things happen, often unexpectedly, and a person‘s life adjusts to account for them.
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I figured a woman can't be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can't even imagine.
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We are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.
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You can't hate your best friend for taking opportunities he'd been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn't it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.