Christopher Barzak Quotes

Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.

As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.

Just two people in love.

My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day.

You're both treated fairly," she said, "but sometimes people require different things for true fairness.

Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.

Only so much truth can exist between two people until it becomes too much, and then they can't bear to be around each other.

That's what love hotels are for."
"I know," says Ai, "but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he's grateful for the love we share without knowing.

Small towns in remote corners of the world are really quaint, unless you don't fit into them. Then they're just small.

Normal is a setting on a washing machine.

Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he'd glow.

Uncharted territory," I said. "The parts on the maps of our lives that we don't understand. In cartographer's language they call these places sleeping beauties.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.

The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.

In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.

Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

You're like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.

Real strength isn't control. It's knowing when to let go.