Bill Kincaid Quotes in Leaves of Grass (2009)

Bill Kincaid: I was born just a few minutes before my brother, Brady. He lived life on his own terms, indifferent to fear - either his own, or those of others. And, let's be honest, by any normal measure my brother was a criminal and a colossal fuckup.

[laughter]

Bill Kincaid: But, in the years that we were together, when we were growing up, he gave me the happiest freest times that I will ever know. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that. I left Little Dixie because of my own fears. My greatest regret is that I never told him how difficult that really was.

Janet: You still leaving tomorrow.

Bill Kincaid: I think so.

Janet: I'll miss you.

Bill Kincaid: And we barely know each other.

Janet: "You have not known what you are. You have slumbered upon yourself all your life. Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time. What you have done returns already in mockeries. The mockeries are not you. Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk."

Bill Kincaid: [absorbing what she'd just quoted] Who was that?

Janet: Walt Whitman.

Bill Kincaid: I don't think I ever imagined hearing him recited to me by a girl gutting a 40 pound catfish.

Janet: That's exactly how he should be recited. He wrote without rhyme or meter. Free verse. Just whatever he felt inside coming out in one intricate rhythm. Pure unashamed passion, without definable restriction.

Bill Kincaid: I'm sorry, see, I have a few issues with that.

Janet: Why?

Bill Kincaid: Because some have dared to suggest that even poetry has rules.

Janet: Or you make your own.

Bill Kincaid: Right there, that's the part I never bought into.

Janet: Because?

Bill Kincaid: If everybody runs around making their own rules, how can you ever find what's true? There's nothing... there's nothing to rely on.

Janet: "One night, I split my cicada skin, devoured your leaves, knowing no poison, no law of nourishment in that larval blindness, a hunger finally true."

Bill Kincaid: Who's that?

Janet: That's me.

Bill Kincaid: [Janet has just caught a monster catfish with her forearm through its mouth, called "noodling"] You have a spiritual objection to monofilament?

Brady Kincaid: [talking about Janet] She's a poet.

Bill Kincaid: What?

Brady Kincaid: Seriously. She writes fuckin' poetry. And she's the Ladies Noodling Champion of '05.

Bill Kincaid: Her?

Brady Kincaid: 125 pounds of catfish in under 10 hours with nothing but her bare hands.

[sigh]

Brady Kincaid: I tried to get her and Colleen in a three-way once, but wouldn't neither of 'em go for it.