Kent Haruf Quotes

I was never a lonely child who sat looking at the rain sliding down the window.

I sit at my window gazing The world passes by, nods to me And is gone.

Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another.

My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.

I would lock myself in my room and drink a case of Corona and smoke a load of pot.

Whoever gives himself up to solitude, Ah! he is soon alone.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.

There she is, lying in front of me, smoking a cigarette, thinking of something or someone else. And that’s how she is stuck in my mind forever. We are two explorers in the dark. Mapless and hopeless. Alone together.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye.

In the distance, he could see Molly lying in the tall grass off to the side of the house.

I left the jutra to chop wood. I began my walk through the snow, five kilometers to the tree line. That's when I saw it. A tiny silver of gold appeared between shades of gray on the horizon. I stared at the amber band of sunlight, smiling. The sun had returned. I closed my eyes. I felt Andrius moving close. "I'll see you," he said. "Yes, I will see you," I whispered "I will." I reached into my pocket and squeezed the stone.

He could start a row in an empty house.

It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.

I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.

The auld wife sat at her ivied door, (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) A thing she had frequently done before; And her spectacles lay on her apron'd knees.

Lone women, like to empty houses, perish.

One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love.

Loneliness is random; solitude is ritual.

I spend most of my free time under the house.

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)