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
“Right or wrong, black or white. Live or die. In peace, he was lost in a sea of gray. Now it was time for war.”
― Dacre Stoker, quote from Dracula the Un-Dead
“Because the only way to resist, our husbands had taught us, was by not resisting.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from The Buddha in the Attic
“And how do you know that you're mad? "To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?" I suppose so, said Alice. "Well then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags it's tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition
“Best of all, Galignani’s, the English bookstore and reading room, a favorite gathering place, stood across the street from the hotel. There one could pass long, comfortable hours with a great array of English and even American newspapers. Parisians were as avid readers of newspapers as any people on earth. Some thirty-four daily papers were published in Paris, and many of these, too, were to be found spread across several large tables. The favorite English-language paper was Galignani’s own Messenger, with morning and evening editions Monday through Friday. For the newly arrived Americans, after more than a month with no news of any kind, these and the American papers were pure gold. Of the several circulating libraries in Paris, only Galignani’s carried books in English, and indispensable was Galignani’s New Paris Guide in English. Few Americans went without this thick little leather-bound volume, fully 839 pages of invaluable insights and information, plus maps.”
― David McCullough, quote from The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
“Heart of my heart, that’s who you are, Adria Morgan. Chosen and forever.” Picking her hand off his cheek, he pressed a lingering kiss to the palm before placing it over the strong, steady rhythm of that very organ. “Wolf and man, you own every part of me.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Tangle of Need
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