“Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.”
“There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing.”
“The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.”
“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog.”
“fault. From the start, it had been him. He had brought Basrahip back from the Sinir Kushku. He had let the priests poison his mind and through him the minds of all Antea. Anyone who might have”
“I don't know what justice is," she said.
"That's because it isn't the sort of thing you discover. It's a thing you make." She looked at him, and he shrugged. "There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It's not that houses and songs aren't real, but you don't just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”
“A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible.”
“The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed.”
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I”
“We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What”
“As far as I can tell, life’s just one flaming piece of shit after another, except when it’s a bunch of them all at once. But”
“Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And”
“För att ta livet av en människa behöver man ju inte sikta med Buck Jones revolver och göra pangpang med den. Det var inte så jag menade. Utan man kan också döda en människa i sitt hjärta. Man gör så att man slutar att tycka om den människan. Och en vacker dag är den människan död.”
“But the goal is not to replace what cannot be replaced, or duplicate what cannot be duplicated, but simply to create opportunities for new memories. One”
“I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect....
.... Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her caviling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. "I don't mean there's anything horrible about him or anything like that. It's just that for four solid years I've kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they're going to be charming, I know when they're going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they're going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they're going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice--or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There's an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they've dropped his name—that he's a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers.
Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful, I'm horrible.”
“A story is a labyrinth, it looks as if there were several ways to go, but only one is right, and there's a nasty surprise ready to punish you for every false step.”
“Emilie gazed across the terrace and the formal gardens to the undulating vineyards that surrounded”
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