Category: Engaging the Culture

“The lawn was so green that if green had a word in its semantic family like red does—that word being vermilion—only that word and no other would have sufficed. Well, maybe the green equivalent of incarnadine might have sufficed, if the light was good.”

Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 5

“The downtown area of Denver had gone rapidly to the dogs—and by ‘the dogs,’ the reference is not to show poodles owned by rich ladies or anything refined and decadent like that. Rather, the dogs that everything had ‘gone to’ would be more like the mangier packs that roam in and around the landfills outside Manila, the kind that would eat dead vultures and call it a treat.”

Ride, Sally, Ride, p. 3

“Whenever something like this happens, as it has from time to time in the annals of geopolitics, any competent historian can, after the fact, show how the subsequent events that proved so momentous, and which crept up on everybody from behind, and which virtually no one predicted, were in actual fact some kind of inevitable. The whole thing was going to happen, somehow, someway. This kind of inevitability is a strange creature of time, being only visible from the rear and never from the front. Historians can see it clearly, but prognosticators, for some reason, cannot.”

Ride, Sally, Ride, pp. 1-2

“Now when the doors at the back of the church swung open, and she fixed her eyes on Thomas, and saw him standing there upright, in a stern gladness, she felt like she was looking down on him from the top of an emerald cloud of joy that surrounded that rainbow in John’s apocalypse. The brilliant notes of the organ’s glory had swirled down the aisle toward the back of the church and washed around her feet like an incoming tide . . . As she advanced down the aisle, Savannah knew herself to be beautiful, and there was no conceit in it anywhere, for the beauty belonged to another entirely. She was the glory of another. Her head was waiting for her at the front of the church, a dear, kind man. But she was not approaching him as though he were a head in need of feet; rather, her waiting head was bare and needed a crown.”

The Man in the Dark, pp. 244-245

“Sex, the way God established it at the very beginning, rules . . . The ancient poet Horace put it with some force when he said Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret, which puts the whole thing into a shoebox. “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back again.”

Ride, Sally, Ride, p. xi

“The groom’s eye was much better, meaning that Mrs. Fuller no longer thought he looked like the chaplain on a pirate ship.”

The Man in the Dark, p. 244