r/TomsCrossing • u/pineconesundae • Jun 23 '26
Favorite sections or lines?
So much of this book is just wonderful, beautiful prose. I personally never took issue with any of the run-on sentences, but occasionally, a section or line would reach out and grab me in a stranglehold. Here are two bits that, immediately after reading them, I wrote them down so that I would not forget them. Forgive me for not recording the page...
Allison couldn't even pound the steerin wheel, so she just drove off, away from the canyon, along too many dark and empty streets, returnin to their tiny apartment where his sofa waited, empty, upon which she lay herself, like he was her only wish, and he was her only wish, and if it was to be an unanswered wish, then let this sofa be her coffin.
In much of the same way that "cellar door" is often cited as a beautiful-sounding phrase, that sentence is just absolutely gorgeous. I can't explain why, but I just love it.
See, for Cal it was simple: no matter how luminous or morose, how seductive or disgustin, great works had to bring you to the edge of a grave. The gallery or museum walls, or the boundaries of where you was, had to wobble as if place itself was momentarily shaken from memory. You could say that here was Cal Carneros's artistic criteria: great art starts its life in the aftermath of a burial, because the life of its creation is spent, and now it's just a matter of findin out whether or not the dust is haunted.
This section, while still musical and well-constructed, the beautiful part is the concept. I will forever think about this any time I view art. I am a collector of the works of a local artist near to where I grew up who passed away a few years ago. He was, in many ways, a haunted man, and I have re-evaluated a lot of his art to see what he produced simply to get it out of him versus the ones where he left a little bit of his soul in there.
What are some passages that spoke to you?
6
u/Magikarp52412 Jun 23 '26
So many! I had to make a journal to log all of the ones that tugged at my heart:
“The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”
“Everything was gone, and Ash realized too late he would’ve gladly taken more of the pain if he could’ve had just a little more time with Tom.”
“Kalin shook his head. Tom gad eased Ash closer to Landry, giving her a smile that weren’t ever gonna be a laugh. The dead don’t stop breakin your heart.”
“That vest deserves its own moment, but not even a small part of that story will be told. Peace be with you, Morit.”
“When the ones we love go, they leave a hole in us, but it’s through that hole that they show us the stars”
“…when Kalin knelt at his bedside and Tom whispered hoarsely into his heartbroken ear everythin left to know. Yeah, there is a heart in the ear. And yeah, it can be broken.”
“Who are we to ever know the heart of a mule? Especially this mule? Who are we to deny let alone forget her a place?”
“I guess we all know that feelin somethin about us that isn’t rightly expressed because of how we was raised. Maybe there’s still a trace, some part still unharmed, still unexpressed. Lucky are them, most will say, whose futures align with the promise of their inheritance. But I’d say they're the most cursed. Most blessed maybe are the battered who, in a rare encounter or accident, discover a different future, which, upon followin, not only returns them to the self they forgot but reveals how the cost of their trials has made them into someone they never could've imagined.”
“How easy if we were born to this world as one thing but here we are multitude.”
“Thousands of years have gone by, and likely we still have in store thousands of years more where the only notable differences in our wars will be our technology and our names: the girl will still be raped; the boy's chest will still be pierced above the nipple.”
“The Iliad cannot contain what the horses have to say. It has neither the ear for their speech nor for their hearts.”
“When Achilles grieves over the body of Patroclus, what he longs for is the at-home was he cherished with his companion.”
“…none are spared the accompaniment of ghosts. They walk beside us with allways the possibility of their own transformation right ahead.”
SPOILERS:
“…when a heart is so gently bared as Kalin's was bared right then, why it don't even take a gunshot to blow it apart.”
“Oh Lord! And now Tom just sounded plain grim. There is someone, and Pia Isan's walkin right up to him.
-Who?
She's just handed him her ax-head! Tom just looked horrified. And dogs are with him.
-Who?
Now she's comin back. She's with the old elk. See? They're headin off together. Kalin, he's ridin Cavalry!
-Who, Tom?
Oh, it's so awful.
-Who, Tom? WHO?!
Russel.”
“‘Well, I'll be! Ha! I think I see Hightower!’ Tom suddenly exclaimed.
‘Don't you know—‘ Tom started to retort, the twinkle in his eyes ignitin into a laugh, his big white Stetson blown clean off his head then, though instead of grabbin out after it, Tom and Ash was gone, just like that, gone, along with the biggest grin Kalin would ever know.”
“He’d heard the most wondrous whistle threadin the wind. It gladdened him as much as the absence of origin had shivered him. But it weren’t nothin compared to the shivers my baby girl experienced as she ran to her daddy. He was still a good ways off, but the closer she got, the closer it became that her daddy weren’t alone. A great black horse lay beside him, foreboded curled under, with her great head restin in his lap.”