77 quotes found
Author · American
American author
“A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldnt let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Arent we half-breeds too? Arent we half our ...”
“Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?”
“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”
“The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to W...”
“Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volkempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequen...”
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.”
“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying te...”
“Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory...”
“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary”
“I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no...”
“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writ...”
“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experiencebuying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hellobecome new all over again.”
“Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.”
“Life is wonderful and strange...and its also absolutely mundane and tiresome. Its hilarious and its deadening. Its a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscill...”
“She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal...”
“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”
“He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except...”
“The universe is full of fuel.”
“The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”
