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a1f56c8
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Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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639a0d2
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We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.
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reality-of-life
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Chris Bohjalian |
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c9912a9
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But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?
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Chris Bohjalian |
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a62c5d6
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I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better....
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Chris Bohjalian |
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2e5d2aa
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When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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48c1aa7
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But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.
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reality
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Chris Bohjalian |
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f0b3da1
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As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wou..
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Chris Bohjalian |
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8a92f62
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And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.
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past
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Chris Bohjalian |
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b163dfe
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My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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ce9cb04
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He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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edda8a5
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The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inc..
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inspirational
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Chris Bohjalian |
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c45e531
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Everything about [chance] scares the bejesus out of so many people; it's the this thing they try to avoid at all costs. Don't travel to the Middle East these days - there's a chance something could happen. Don't get involved with that new fellow on Creamery Street - I hear a lot of mud was scraped off his floor after the divorce. Don't have your baby at home - there's a a chance something could go wrong. Don't don't don't... Well, you can't..
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Chris Bohjalian |
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67b3922
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But history does matter. There are lines connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. They are obviously morbid. Really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents' story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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2f42185
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No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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9356679
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With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.
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life-lessons
maturity
experience
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Chris Bohjalian |
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f01a500
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I don't know, maybe I just wanted to be alone. Maybe I just didn't want to be social because antisocial people have a whole lot less to lose.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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dd58b55
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Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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fe17c8a
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He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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5a5c881
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And when something wasn't working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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9d5e5a6
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Though angels were easy to finds in cemeteries, she said that she didn't especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs -- she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead -- and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she wanted to commune.
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cemeteries
tombstones
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Chris Bohjalian |
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8fa9930
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The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn't a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?)...
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Chris Bohjalian |
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bc0d54d
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Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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fd311fd
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Dead ... might not be quiet at all.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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254638c
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Then there were those girls who became midwives: girls who could not get enough of the tiniest of babies - girls who would grow into women who absolutely reveled in the magnificent process of birth...The difference between a woman who becomes an OB and the women who becomes and midwife has less to do with education, philosophy or upbringing than with the depth of her appreciation for the miracle of labor and for life in its moment of emerge..
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Chris Bohjalian |
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058c5f9
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Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75
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Chris Bohjalian |
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3665614
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No surgery in the world was going to offer him the particular history that went along with growing up female. No procedure was going to give him the joys or the terrors that must accompany pregnancy- that must, for teen girls, make sex a walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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566a07b
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How the Germans can remain allies with the Turks is beyond me. No European nation would ever commit the sorts of crimes that this regime is blithely committing right now.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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cc407c2
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Children are resilient," Anise said, simultaneously agreeing with her friend and cutting her off. "But often their wounds simply remain invisible until, all at once, whatever is festering there becomes agonizingly apparent."
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Chris Bohjalian |
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ea4bbc0
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Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband's. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.
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home
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Chris Bohjalian |
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a00c6fa
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She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.
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world-war-2
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Chris Bohjalian |
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6509196
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He moved quickly away from her through the ring, his whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then -- the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back -- he was rising, rising, rising. . . And aloft.
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horses
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Chris Bohjalian |
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7179ba6
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Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. --Margaret Atwood
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Chris Bohjalian |
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2c4b132
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The dead were too ...present.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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fb07a90
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a smart girl is nobody's pushover and nobody's foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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2a82f5b
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The problem with always having to be right is that sometimes you're not. And so, if you're like me, those times when you're not, you try and save face--especially after you've seriously fucked up. You make one bad decision and then another, trying to fix that very first fuck-up.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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6225f13
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Sometimes I believe we would all be better off if we always treated people like this was the last time we were ever going to see them
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Chris Bohjalian |
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029e9bd
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They studied the way the world changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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f6680b4
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In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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bcde783
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At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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52c86ac
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Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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0a3b65d
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It was Aldous Huxley who observed, "Every man's memory is his private literature."
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Chris Bohjalian |
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aa90b55
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She feared that she'd missed something, because there were so many parallels with her own story, and she could not help but see in her head the small memories her mind would offer as tantalizing, but--in the end unsatisfying, glimpses of what may have occurred.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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36ad412
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She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn't. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.
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Chris Bohjalian |
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b3ad3aa
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Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.
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Chris Bohjalian |