Camilla Gibb Quotes

It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife

He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.

I never expected to be happy, to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I didn't grow up with a sense that this was possible or even desirable. I'm quite sure my parents didn't either, so I come by this honestly.

It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.

The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.

How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It's like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.

The velvet darkness of his face

That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind.

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what constitutes a personal question are quite different from their own. Tư has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy?

If someone eliminates the obstacles you believe to be in front of you, then you have no choice but to try. Fail spectacularly, if you will, but try.