Dan Groat Quotes

Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.

~ Dan Groat

I had always been a boy in this place, and many of the trees and rocks and streams had been old men when I knew them. Some had died. All had changed. I knew that. I had changed the most.

~ Dan Groat

The world bein’ so small ain’t always a good thing for those of us who ain’t searchin’ for new and different stuff.

~ Dan Groat

One of the worst things I’ve learned about getting older is that there seems to be more change that you don’t like than there was when you were younger and you can’t do nothin’ about it.

~ Dan Groat

If the forest has a day of fire and the heat of the flames does not consume a special tree, it will still be changed; charred, but still standing.

~ Dan Groat

Time is not tinder for any flame. It will not gather a spark, it will not smolder. It will not change.

~ Dan Groat

The gear teeth of his mind, the cogs of the brain’s machinery that propelled his thoughts, were grinding to a halt, too long forced to fight against the friction of agony without the aid of hope, the lubricant for the soul.

~ Dan Groat

You can be spiritual all by yourself. Everybody has a soul. But to be religious, it seems like you need other people, and then sometimes it becomes more about the people than the soul.

~ Dan Groat

Porches could be cleaned with a broom in a few minutes, but the soul could not be swept. It had to be shaken. And shaking the loess from a soul took a lifetime and more strength than most people had.

~ Dan Groat

It remains for you to save one before saving others, to lead one before leading others.

~ Dan Groat

Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.

~ Dan Groat

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

~ Dan Groat

If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.

~ Dan Groat

Peace, a commodity purchased with friendship and safety and anything comfortable and all things familiar; peace that was a pleasant melody playing through the moments of their day; a chord striking only the notes of security and agreement and understanding and order.

~ Dan Groat

Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.

~ Dan Groat

Music is the sound of unspoken thoughts.

~ Dan Groat

Does the plain, simple beauty of life get buried under society’s so-called required daily activities or is that just true of me? No, I know I’m not alone in that feeling. We all get caught up in the making and spending of money. I know it’s not just me.

~ Dan Groat

Just make sure the day doesn’t pass without sayin’ what’s in your heart. Sometimes you pass up those chances and they’re gone forever.

~ Dan Groat

There are struggles you cannot win, but a man can meet his own heart if value is found in loss. Give yourself permission to cry.

~ Dan Groat

A silence overtook the odd family in their odd surroundings as loss became the mockery of the moment, and they were caught up in the emotional release that is common in a theater audience after the sudden ending of a tragic movie; the curtain closes and the people are still in their seats, numb and sighing their way back into reality.

~ Dan Groat

We are born among relatives. Family is defined by loyalty.

~ Dan Groat

I can’t tell you what’s in all of God’s plans, but I do know part of them. He empowers you with reason and will. Those are your strengths. That’s what gives you the chance to be great in his sight. He gave you a mind and codes to live by so you could be in charge of your own actions.

~ Dan Groat

Some people get what they want because they grab the power and swing it, and some people don’t.

~ Dan Groat

Politics is all about dividing up the power. Washington D.C. likes to talk about spreading the wealth, but never spreading the power.

~ Dan Groat

Governments have absolutely no interest in self-reliance. It defeats one of the purposes for their existence. They encourage and thrive on dependency. The more of it they sell, the more necessary they are, and the more power and money they need.

~ Dan Groat

The power of our country relies on the character that comes out of each of our homes.

~ Dan Groat

The world has a way of dragging down our mood.

~ Dan Groat

Seek until there is no hope and then seek further. Seek without end. Trudge on without tiring and without fear and without disheartenment. Trudge on, for it is within you to fight any enemy. It is who you are. It is your past and your present and your future. You will not quit. You cannot quit. Your breath is your courage, and as you breathe, so must you hope or you are already dead.

~ Dan Groat

Our bird of hope was being denied the altitude it sought, just free enough to fly dangerously close to the reality of the treetops.

~ Dan Groat

Sometimes when the three of us were together on our own, we would have a good time. I was pretty young, but sometimes we would go off in the woods and build forts and fight Indians and I think things were about as close to fine as they ever got right then during those times. In the woods. No parents. No yelling.

~ Dan Groat

As you get older, you have to be willing and able to choose your own path for your life. And once you choose it, you walk it with strength. If you meet evil along the way, know that it is supposed to make you afraid, but it’s not supposed to stop you. You walk through the fear and you walk through the evil, and you don’t let either one become your master.

~ Dan Groat

A government that thinks it can remedy personal failure is an intrusion in everybody’s life. No law is going to cure a human’s lack of physical or mental effectiveness. I’d rather see democracy promote strength than reward weakness.

~ Dan Groat

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

~ Dan Groat

It’s a funny thing, one day you’re living and the next day you’re not sometimes, whether you have plans or not. Wishes and wants get trumped by the reaper every time. I don’t even know if I would want a warning if it was my time. I think I’d rather be surprised.

~ Dan Groat

Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.

~ Dan Groat

Sometimes, you need to spit stuff out in words to get it better arranged in your head. I figure if you never talk about it, it just picks its own spot and lays there and festers.

~ Dan Groat

I wonder if God hears prayers if the only time you make them is when you’re in trouble.

~ Dan Groat

The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.

~ Dan Groat

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.

~ Dan Groat

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

~ Dan Groat