from last year’s John Dos Passos Prize for Literature winner Kent Haruf’s reading/acceptance,

“It’s not pretty but it’s beautiful if you know how to look at it.”

&

“We may not be the smartest sons-of-bitches but we sure know how to kill weeds.”

&& my favorite, a poem,

“Daniel Boone shot a raccoon/in a lagoon/in the month of June.”

“I am a sick, sick man.  Not only am I consumed by hatred, I am delighted by it.  I have done some checking into the matter and have discovered that the world’s great religions and wisdom traditions tend to frown upon this.  Therefore, dear reader, I need your prayers…”

&

(on Duke’s Coach K’s back pain) “Now the normal human certainly would feel sympathy for a man in such pain.  But I am a North Carolina fan and by definition, at least when it comes to Duke, not a normal man”

–from the first chapter of Will Blythe’s To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever:  A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry, written by a Carolina fan of course.

“The summer raced on. (‘Not without dust and heat,’ Lawrence several times remarked, in his private ironic voice.) The roses wilted on the roof and on the banks next to the road. The creek dwindled, and beside it honeysuckle leaves lay limply on the vines”

–Alice Adams, “Roses, Rhododendron”

It is in the summer when I find myself the most homesick, find myself longing the most for the unrelenting heat of the eastern North Carolina lowlands. Impossible to avoid after days and days of no rain, the weight of the air before an intense summer storm is likely to stifle, the first few drops of rain–a sweet relief–beading on the dusty sand of tobacco fields.