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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“The love of a good man, for a good woman. The love of good friend for each other. The love of parents for children, and children for parents. The love of brothers and sisters. The memory of joy and grief, which all becomes joy when enough time has passed. This is the treasure that I have won through all the years of my journey through this life.... And every bit of it I'll take with me beyond the grave. I'll meet God then... and I will take all these treasures and lay them out before his feet, for God can see them easily even if mortal man cannot. And I'll kneel before the treasures and say, "O God, I thank thee for giving these to me during my life on Earth. No daughter has been better loved than I, nor any wife, nor any mother. I never deserved them. They were not mine by right. But I hope that, having been given such gifts so undeservingly, I used them well, and gave back to thee a life that was worthy.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Sarah
“work for Shamron, he would have to leave the Vecellio”
― Daniel Silva, quote from The Kill Artist
“Floyd made it a rule never to worry about events over which he could have absolutely no control; any external threat would reveal itself in due time and must be dealt with then. But he could not help wondering if they had done”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from 2010: Odyssey Two
“Most of the time, it felt like my father and I were completely different species. Possibly literally, depending on the day and whether or not I actually qualified as human at the time.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, quote from Every Other Day
“Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged lovers are a joke—not a very funny one.”
― Booth Tarkington, quote from The Magnificent Ambersons
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