Fire Exit

But one thing is for certain, I thought: you are who you are, even if you don’t know it.

We are made of stories, and if we don't know them--the ones that make us--how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?

how strange it is to want something you did not like, or something that seemed a bad part of your life. But maybe, like most things, it wasn’t all bad.

When she was in one of those dark places, she used to worry about anything and everything. A loose nail, a strange passing car, a heavy rain, a heavy snow, or no rain, no snow.

When you’re in need, even the person you hate or distrust the most is someone you can rely on, especially when they, the hated, know they are needed for something important.

We’re all alike, even when we’re not.

It’s best to expect nothing,” he said. “That way you don’t get your hopes up.

...I was thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, never ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat. [Charles Lamosway, referring to Louise, his mother]

That's my life, though--not knowing, but wishing. [Charles Lamosway]

...what's more sacred than laughter at the dinner table?

Maybe all we are is creation's translators, putting things like granite or oak or elephant or corn in a language they want to be put in, to give them bodies made of sound so they're measurable.

What's more sacred than laughter at the dinner table.

sometimes simplicity is best and truest.

...Gizos began to cry. Not a little, a lot. Since that day I've never seen a boy, or a man, cry that hard. Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body and spirit's self-recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit's communicating to another's body and spirit in one and only one language--that of deep, deep emotion--between the flesh of two free bodies. I say 'free' here because it's true--what is freer than that, freer than one body welcoming and receiving another's in a state or condition so unchanged since the very beginning of bodies, a state or condition that has continually been jailed time and time again since that very beginning? [Charles Lamosway]