Christopher Barzak · 304 pages
Rating: (505 votes)
“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Normal is a setting on a washing machine.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Uncharted territory,” I said. “The parts on the maps of our lives that we don’t understand. In cartographer’s language they call these places sleeping beauties.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“You see, that’s what’s so odd, how everyone thinks they’re normal and the truth is no one in the world is normal at all. Isn’t that wonderful?”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“You’re like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he’d glow.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“That’s what love hotels are for.”
“I know,” says Ai, “but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he’s grateful for the love we share without knowing.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“He was all surface, written on by those who’d pass him, like a love hotel diary.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
“Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That’s pretty much Japan through and through.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
Christopher Barzak
Born place: Warren, Ohio, The United States
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“It's enough to make you believe. Maybe not in symbols; maybe not in gods. But certainly in people.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us
“Does he feel my request is unreasonable? (“Why does my mother bug me to wash behind my ears? Nobody looks there.”)”
― Adele Faber, quote from How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
“If I sequenced my own genome and showed it to a geneticist, she would be able to say approximately where on the planet I or my ancestors came from by matching variants in my genome with the geographic patterns of variants across the globe. She would not, however, be able to tell whether I was smart or dumb, tall or short, or almost anything else that matters with respect to how I function as a human being. Indeed, despite the fact that most efforts to understand the genome have sprung from efforts to combat disease, for the vast majority of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, our current understanding allows us only to assign vague probabilities to the likelihood that an individual will develop them.”
― quote from Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
“I’ve had a long life. You haven’t. You love your family. Go to another world. Find a…a husband—” He broke off and that rattle began deep in his chest. His next words came out thickly, around fangs. “Have children. Rebuild the human race. Live all those dreams you used to have.” “Used to,” I agreed, nipping his full lower lip. “Don’t anymore. Can’t even conceive of them. You’re my dream.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Feversong
“Hunger and poverty steal your childhood and take away your innocence and sense of security. But I was one of the lucky ones because I not only survived but learned to thrive. •”
― quote from A Long Way Home
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