South of the Angels Quotes

“He lived where he was, began to enjoy the moment he was in, instead of fuming about the moment of departure which should have, and had not, arrived. These were his life's beatitudes, times when his own nature did not separate him from his life; when the needle of his being held steady at the very moment and place of his existence. It was his ambition to live his whole life in this way; though he had schemes and plans for everything else, he knew no way to scheme himself into such moments.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“He had heard it said that some men are born for the sea, some for the mountains. And that they feel this destiny in their bones from the very beginning and fight their way toward their rightful places. All he had wanted was his own place, his own land, a chance to make his own living and be beholden to no one....He felt strangled,..like a man held down by weeds under water who suddenly breaks free and rises to the surface. He breathed in the air like life itself, sweeter than any food or drink he had ever tasted. He held his hands out into it; he would like to gather up a fistful of it, do more than breathe it.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“Somewhere between four and five, when the spring afternoon ended and the spring evening began, the people filled with sardines and soda crackers, their dry throats moistened with canned tomatoes and soda pop, began to sing. The day that had begun in peace was ending in war. People had shadows the size and shape of peaked tombstones. Blueness, fold on fold, enveloped the foothills. The stomp of oil wells deep inside the earth was felt. Meadow larks and blackbirds were suddenly quiet, then, as if resisting the oncoming night, sang loudly. Raunce's cow bawled to be milked. Old Saddle Back was rosy above the valley's shadows. The April summer evening, the first of the war, came down with melancholy softness and beauty.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“He survived the singing...he survived the collection of money for the home guard, a flag drill and a speech...But he did not survive a recitation by a...child. When she reached the lines

A man is dying in no-man's land,
Before he goes, he asks for your hand....

Asa departed the rally.

He was glad to escape, but he was no happier outside than he had been inside. He was not sure where the greater sickness lay, in himself, unable by love or war to feel himself united with his neighbors, or in his neighbors, united by the cause and in the manner they were. He looked up at the stars, winter's constellations setting in the west, summer's constellations marching up the eastern sky. They had the power to calm and ease, but to take that calm and ease on the first night of so many men's deaths seemed ignoble. Endure the pain, he told himself, star love is too easy. The stars ask nothing of you. He defended himself against his own abuse. "I ask a good deal of myself. What? In God's name, what? Tell me quickly," his suffering self demanded. "To know, to understand." It was a barren defense. He got no comfort out of it. He took what comfort he could get from the stars.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“The Tract, which had been too busy fighting its own battles...to worry about Europe, was trying now in a single evening to anticipate wounds and bullets, losses and hatreds. In the moments in which they were able to do so, sudden silences, like a thickening of night's darkness, would settle upon the crowd. Though the air on the skin was as warm as summer, there was no summer for the ear, no summer sounds of katydids and locusts, cicadas and crickets. War had come overnight, but a real summer has to ripen. A war can be thought up, anyone can declare it, and death can be instant. But no amount of thought has ever produced a katydid, life cannot be declared, and summer takes a little time.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“The calendar gave him unmoving pools of quiet in which to rest. He spent hours looking at the calendar. It was time past and time to come, divided into neat little boxes, and the boxes named and numbered. He would look at a box ahead, say, February 25, 1917, and think, Inside that box, I and everyone else on earth, minus a few who will die before then and plus a few who will be born, will have our lives. Inside that box, each of my acts and feelings for that twenty-four hours awaits me. And because he was sick, there was not much he could do to prepare for or to control those acts which waited for him to become their center....

Most of the time, he was alone. He took deep breaths of the raw smell of seed potatoes, newly cut and bleeding their milky starch. He inhaled the sun-warmed scent of the creosote-stained redwood planks. The top quilt on his bed was pieced in a star design. Each star was made up of God knows how many pieces, and each piece was of a different color and design. The designs were a tanglewood maze of leaves and flowers and stars and branches. When he got tired of calendar quiet and of cataloging smells, he took up quilt-gazing. He didn't need a world a minute bigger than his room, an inch wider than his calendar, or an iota sweeter than his own breath. But he was the only one who knew this.”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels

“As he spoke and she listened, the sounds of people talking, of children playing, became faint. The girl and he were alone under the great sailing moon... He told a story he was amazed to hear. What he had to say about horses seemed to have meanings pertinent to the whole world. He was clearing up mysteries for himself as he went along.

If you got to the bottom of one subject, did the truth about all other subjects lie there, too? If you knew one thing fully, did you, in a way, know all? Was that the reason old farmers and coon hunters were so wise?

Once before in his life he had been drunk. At the age of sixteen, he had sampled a jug of raw corn whisky. He had felt a kind of power at the time: as if he had transcended himself, were suspended above himself. This enabled him to see a lot of the world ordinarily not visible; he saw also his own smallness in this world.

Now he was drunk again, but in an entirely different way. He was more himself than he had ever been before; and this was happening at the very minute when he was also more aware of another person than he had ever been before. How could this be? It contradicted all the rules of arithmetic. To give himself away and to have more left. He felt like saying his own name over and over again...that was who he had been, but might never be again; for this girl was making him over by listening to him....it was not a one-sided conversation...he could never have done it without her. She taught him all his powers, showed him all his meanings. Until she asked her questions, he didn't know his answers. He had never in his life felt so radiant. She looked at him, she asked. He spoke. Something towered upward out of the interchange; together they opened up meaning he had never glimpsed before...”
― Jessamyn West, South of the Angels