Chris Bohjalian Quotes

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.

I answer two or three letters a day. I'm just not the he-has-a-secretary kind of guy.

She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn't as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.

Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.

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.

Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.

I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.

In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park.
And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman's family.

Too often we presume that the unexpected strangers in our lives bode ill,or we are skeptical of their designs.We think we know more.

And while I am well aware that there is indeed all manner of malevolence in the ether,there is benevolence there,too

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.

She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game.

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.

If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would turn from sod to stone, and it would seem as if they were walking inside a crag in a cliff. The sky would be reduced to a thin swath of blue, broken in parts by the branches of the trees that grew above them along the sides of this ancient channel.

I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.

Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time.

I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.

Seriously," the banker went on, "what do you investigate? I have a feeling you do more than find stray kittens and bring home lost babies."
"Murder.

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.

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.

We have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.

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.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

The Beatrice that obsessed Dante was a Florentine named Bice di Folco Portinari. Envision this moment (and, in all fairness, I am envisioning it the way Henry Holiday did in his exquisite nineteenth-century painting): Bice is walking beside the Arno River, dressed in white, the fabric clinging to her legs and outlining her slender thighs, and there is Dante. He meets her at the corner of one of the bridges that span
the river. His left hand, at first glimpse, is moving casually toward his hip; it is only on a more careful study that one realizes his hand is actually going up to his heart. Meanwhile, his right hand is resting on the bridge's waist-high stone balustrade, as if Bico's beauty is such that he needs to steady himself when he beholds her.

Be wary of what I might learn. "No. Do you think I should?" "I don't know. Maybe," she replied, and in my mind I saw her in her high-backed bar stool at the island in the kitchen where the kids scarfed down their Lucky Charms before walking down the hill to school. Then, before I could answer, she went on, "It will be weird if we're related to the woman in the photo." "In what way?" "She's so ... " "Go ahead," I said. "She's not like us. Even if she is related to us, she's not like us. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that she's from a different world.

A term came to her that they used on occasion at the shelter: the double bind ... They used the expression in much the same way that they would use a term like catch-22.

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?) ...

They studied the way the world
changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

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.

I kind of understood at a young age that I didn't play well with most other kids in the sandbox.

And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.

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.

Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm.

Supposedly, whatever we do that's selfish goes with us to the grave; whatever we do that's selfless lives on.

As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

We were too young- and the ground too muddy- for our small part of the earth to move.

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.

A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom
I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else
but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.

Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the theme from Gilligan's Island? Not kidding, this is totally legit.

On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.

Serafina may think I'm a crazy person, but I'm not. She has her scars, too - and not only the ones I saw when she turned her head and her hair fell aside. We are both living out our lives in a Purgatorio. The difference? I arrived from the Paradiso, once young and married and so in love. But Serafina, she who was born alone in a fever dream of fire? She whose very skin is a tapestry of loss? Serafina, of course, arrived from the Inferno.

This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person's self respect

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.

The message, if you think about it this way, is all about taking chances because fate or destiny or God will protect you. Take a risk, have a little faith. It's all about life, not death.

I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better ...

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?

If we are lucky, we can find a moment on the 31st to take a deep breath and sit very still. We can focus on all that is right with the world and all that is wrong - on all the ways we have striven for personal decency in our lives and, alas, on all the ways we have failed. We can recall the people we have loved who we have lost, and ponder the friends and family who deserve more attention than we give them.

And maybe those are the only resolutions that matter: the ones that focus on others.

We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?

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 emergence.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

I need complete silence when I write.

Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine ... and then make them plausible.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

That might just mean that I had nothing better to do

If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.

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 wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences.

There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'

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?

You can repair anything but dead. You can't fix that. So you bury the dead an move on.

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.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

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.

...The plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.

Nothing
and I mean nothing, Carly Banks
is crazy if you're in love.

The dead were too ...present.

I do have hobbies - I garden and bike, for example - but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend.

But she insists the family hadn't a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?
I really have become quite the Dante scholar: There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially
romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

She talks and talks because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.