Quotes from The Story of the Lost Child

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“To write, you have to want something to survive you.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“the laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“She possessed intelligence and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila's intelligence.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“The depressed don’t write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place.”
“Isn’t that how it is?”
No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it’s only for a very brief time. Otherwise they’re useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“I’m laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who’ve wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I’m laughing out of despair, because I’ve never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don’t know if you can imagine, because at this moment I’m so ill that I think I’m fainting.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Mas ela sorriu: onde é que está escrito que as vidas devem ter um sentido?”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Mi ero accorta da tempo che ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene, tuttora mi sorprendo a farlo anch'io”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Ah, the violence: tearing, killing, ripping. Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart. The entire planet, she said, is a big Fosso Carbonario.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Toda relación intensa entre seres humanos está plagada de cepos y si se quiere que dure hay que aprender a esquivarlos.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“Toda relação intensa entre seres humanos é cheia de armadilhas e, caso se queira que dure, é preciso aprender a desviar-se delas.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

“To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.”
― quote from The Story of the Lost Child

Popular quotes

“Tenways showed his rotten teeth. ‘Fucking make me.’
‘I’ll give it a try.’ A man came strolling out of the dark, just his sharp jaw showing in the shadows of his hood, boots crunching heedless through the corner of the fire and sending a flurry of sparks up around his legs. Very tall, very lean and he looked like he was carved out of wood. He was chewing meat from a chicken bone in one greasy hand and in the other, held loose under the crosspiece, he had the biggest sword Beck had ever seen, shoulder-high maybe from point to pommel, its sheath scuffed as a beggar’s boot but the wire on its hilt glinting with the colours of the fire-pit. He sucked the last shred of meat off his bone with a noisy slurp, and he poked at all the drawn steel with the pommel of his sword, long grip clattering against all those blades. ‘Tell me you lot weren’t working up to a fight without me. You know how much I love killing folk. I shouldn’t, but a man has to stick to what he’s good at. So how’s this for a recipe…’ He worked the bone around between finger and thumb, then flicked it at Tenways so it bounced off his chain mail coat. ‘You go back to fucking sheep and I’ll fill the graves.’
Tenways licked his bloody top lip. ‘My fight ain’t with you, Whirrun.’
And it all came together. Beck had heard songs enough about Whirrun of Bligh, and even hummed a few himself as he fought his way through the logpile. Cracknut Whirrun. How he’d been given the Father of Swords. How he’d killed his five brothers. How he’d hunted the Shimbul Wolf in the endless winter of the utmost North, held a pass against the countless Shanka with only two boys and a woman for company, bested the sorcerer Daroum-ap-Yaught in a battle of wits and bound him to a rock for the eagles. How he’d done all the tasks worthy of a hero in the valleys, and so come south to seek his destiny on the battlefield. Songs to make the blood run hot, and cold too. Might be his was the hardest name in the whole North these days, and standing right there in front of Beck, close enough to lay a hand on. Though that probably weren’t a good idea.
‘Your fight ain’t with me?’ Whirrun glanced about like he was looking for who it might be with. ‘You sure? Fights are twisty little bastards, you draw steel it’s always hard to say where they’ll lead you. You drew on Calder, but when you drew on Calder you drew on Curnden Craw, and when you drew on Craw you drew on me, and Jolly Yon Cumber, and Wonderful there, and Flood – though he’s gone for a wee, I think, and also this lad here whose name I’ve forgotten.’ Sticking his thumb over his shoulder at Beck. ‘You should’ve seen it coming. No excuse for it, a proper War Chief fumbling about in the dark like you’ve nothing in your head but shit. So my fight ain’t with you either, Brodd Tenways, but I’ll still kill you if it’s called for, and add your name to my songs, and I’ll still laugh afterwards. So?’
‘So what?’
‘So shall I draw?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Heroes

“She's like snow in Russian," said Anna. "Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that [the rose]....”
― Eva Ibbotson, quote from A Countess Below Stairs

“I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You’re already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope, Jess.”
― Leslie Feinberg, quote from Stone Butch Blues

“Okay, this might sound vague, but do you know this one girl with hair like this?”
― Bryan Lee O'Malley, quote from Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

“Forget what others think when you wish to dance in the rain. Just do it. It’s your moment. It’s your happiness.”
― Ravinder Singh, quote from I Too Had a Love Story

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