Best Of Linda Hogan's "Solar Storms"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Solar Storms by Linda Hogan.

After that your absence sat at every table, occupied every room, walked through the doors of every house.

p.18

She'd looked larger than she was, but her body seemed too light to contain a living soul. I thin i twas because her radiance was bigger than her body.

p.32

Whatever it was, I was traveling backward in time toward myself at the same time I journeyed forward, like the new star astronomers found that traveled in two directions at once.

p.64

She was, in the first moment of my seeing her, equal parts light and water. And she had the closed look people wear when they are too much alone. It seemed that I would interrupt nothing in her life. But even so, seeing her, I was witness to a kind of grace I was hard put to describe; I've seen it carried int eh stillness of deer and I've felt it in the changing power of seasons. It was only a glimpse - that's all I can say with words--that there was something about her that knew itself.

p.67

I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however strange, was dream enough with its dark roots, its instinctual light and full sky. I had traveled long and hard to be there. I'd searched all my life for this older world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain.

p.79

One day I would wake up and know that everything had started to change, that I was no longer empty space, that I had become full, or was growing toward it. It would start with a  small, warm circle inside my stomach. It was longing. It was sadness. It was moments of joy.

p.106

It made me sad to think of her, but the healing outpouring of tears comes slowly in winter, if at all. Like everything else, like water stopped in the rivers, tears wait for spring. Grief is forced to a halt.

p.114

[...] but the laws of winter were a justice foreign to my nature

p.117

"Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing."

p.125

That's still what we did, smile at each other. The worst thing about love is its passionate foolishness.

p.125

Dreams, she said to me, were how animals were tracked and hunted, how human lives were carried out in other times, other places.

p.127

To my surprise, I was getting used to silence, I found it rich and necessary.

p.129

"Maybe you didn't hear me." With an edge of stubbornness. It wasn't so much that she thought they would argue her out of it; it was because when thaw comes, everything moves more quickly, even words.

p.135

"Maps are only masks over the face of God. There are other ways around the world."

p.138

Love is a beginning, a secret warmth that grows, something that comes alive; inside skin a soul turns over and opens its eyes. Love, I realize now, is a third person come to stand between the loving two.

p.143

I grew accustomed to our closeness. And to our silences. We had ourselves more strongly than I'd ever had in any private room. There were never invasions into thought or dream. The others knew the secret of dwelling inside their bodies, remaining there. They knew the secret peace of silence.

p.235

On this land, a person had to live by feeling. There was no other choice. Dreaming, too, could be counted on [...] There was a deep intelligence in this, and I, too, was feeling the rhythm of it inside myself.

p.236

I understood how it felt to be part one thing and part another, to be alone and away from your pack, to have a soul that wandered.

p.273 

Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece.

p.325

Guns in solder's hands, Bush would say, always shoot precious things. It was true, like one of Husk's rules of physics. It wasn't their heads that shot, or even their minds. I am trying to say they were not bad people. They were common as sons and brothers and that made it all the more frightening.

p.328

Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.

p.340

There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe int he presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love.

p.344