16 quotes found
“A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.”
“The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.”
“In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.”
“In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.”
“Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be”
“For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.”
“When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I rea...”
“Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”
“- "I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself.” Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, I believe he is talking about me, offering me a fa...”
“Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the...”
“My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the d...”
“...fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory--why else...would anyone give birth more than once?”
“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the o...”
“No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.”
“Eventually, my grandfather said: - You must understand, this is one of those moments.- What moments?- One of those moments you keep to yourself.…The story of this war… that belongs to everyone… But...”
“It's a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo had done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice.”
