Catching up with my reading...

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” “…. I understood a simple fact: if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world – indeed, nowhere is the world.”

“’I understand your dismay, Fraulein Averbuch. I truly do. I am not certain I would be able to make the decision I am asking you to make. I would be just as tormented, just as anguished. I would be angry at those who asked me to decide. But I cannot be you; we cannot be someone else. We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that’s our home. We need life. There is too much death already, and there is probably more coming our way.’
‘What is life? This is no lie. Who wants this life?’
‘The dead leave it to us to struggle in this world. They go elsewhere, wherever it is, and wait for God to sort it all out. But we have to stay here, to be here, no matter how hard it is. Nobody can be alone. Life is the life of others. My life, your life, that is nothing.’
‘Curse upong your head, Herr Taube. May you reach the bottom of my suffering and die there.’ ‘Think of life, I beg you. Let’s live. We have to live.’”

“Between the licks of his swirling-candy stick, Lazarus asks Olga if she love someone. Yes, she says. He asks her if she is going to marry him. Probably not, she says. Why not? Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.”


The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way.”

“I wondered if we’d ever leave the bed. I didn’t want to. Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.”

“The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.”

“Their love blazed from them. And then they left. I think now that everything that was concentrated in that one look – there in raising me, their patient lessons in every subject they knew to teach, their wincing efforts to give me freedoms, their example of fortitude in work – allowed me to survive myself.”


Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
“What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”

“’Never love a wild thing. … That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”


The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.” ~ Isak Dinesen

“I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.”

“Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.”

“It’s my time to die, and it’s your time to live. Don’t mess it up.”

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”

“If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.”