← Fiction

Zoli

by Colum McCann · 2006

A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature. Zoli Novotna, a young woman… more

15 quotes ★ 3.70 (4,279) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

There are no days more full than those we go back to.
50
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
31
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
28
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
22
She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
20
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
17
He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.
15
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.
15
That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.
5
The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it.
5
There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.
4
...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.
3
although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness
2
There are moments we return to. We are in theme. We rest there and there is nothing else.
1
I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen--how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.
1

About Colum McCann

We have collected 156 quotes from 7 books by Colum McCann on BookQuoters.

More about the author →

About the book

A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature.

Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann.

But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway–neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for the

Book details

First published
2006
Genre
Fiction
Goodreads rating
3.70 (4k ratings)

Keep reading