Tracy Kidder · 277 pages
Rating: (13.5K votes)
“... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.”
“In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.”
“I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after yourselves?' And I think He's been sleeping too much.”
“So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.”
“He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, "I have learned never to say, 'Never again.”
“He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.”
“One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.”
“I stared at the faces of the dead students. “You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus.” “Exactly!” said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. “And neither could the killers!” “The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,” whispered Zacharie. “So they ask. Because they can’t tell. We are the same people.”
“When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.”
“Llamas? Really, Lex? For their manure?” Airiana asked as Lexi headed toward the door. “You weren’t kidding, were you?”
“There are studies done about concocting a sort of tea with their manure and using it on the plants . . .”
Airiana held up her hand. “Don’t use ‘tea’ and ‘manure’ in the same sentence or I’ll have to pound you into the ground.”
“You’re such a baby,” Lexi said. “It’s science. You’re supposed to love science.”
“I draw the line at foul-smelling llama-manure tea.”
-Airiana & Lexi”
“I also wish you to look at the Bridge of My only-begotten Son, and see the greatness thereof, for it reaches from Heaven to earth, that is, that the earth of your humanity is joined to the greatness of the Deity thereby.”
“I’ve been slowly falling for you for a long time, and I’m afraid I fell the rest of the way in love
with you last night, and you’re so much more than my darling. You’re my treasure”
“Just when I despaired -- she was there, filling me as a melody fills a cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight. I knew the life of the Autarch's court, where poison waited in a diamond cup. I learned what it was for one who had never seen a cell or felt a whip to be a prisoner of the torturers, what dying meant, and death.
I learned that I had been more to her than I had ever guessed, and at last fell into a sleep in which my dreams were all of her. Not memories merely -- memories I had possessed in plenty before. I held her poor, cold hands in mine, and I no longer wore the rags of an apprentice, nor the fuligin of a journeyman. We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters.”
“By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:”
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