Michael Paterniti Quotes

#1. Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [ ... ], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines.

Michael Paterniti

#2. Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

Michael Paterniti

#3. Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!

Michael Paterniti

#4. Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.

Michael Paterniti

#5. Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope.

Michael Paterniti

#6. From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

Michael Paterniti

#7. on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness. In

Michael Paterniti

#8. Even now, when I imagine Einstein's dendrites and neurons firing as his brain lit upon relativity, I picture Baghdad, with its minarets and modern-antennaed buildings sparkling beneath thousands of phantasmagorical tracers, under Allied attack on a very dark night.

Michael Paterniti

#9. We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.

Michael Paterniti

#10. You can count on your enemies," said Emilia now, "but sometimes it's the one who smiles who keeps you up at night." There

Michael Paterniti

#11. It's the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.

Michael Paterniti

#12. we're beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere.

Michael Paterniti

#13. He'd taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.

Michael Paterniti

#14. In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative
there always was
but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?

Michael Paterniti

#15. Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [ ... ]

Michael Paterniti

#16. Didn't anybody respect tradition, making food by hand, the slow way? Hadn't anyone frittered away a Sunday afternoon at the bodega gorging themselves on the bounty of the land - the sparkling wine, the beautifully constructed chorizo?

Michael Paterniti

#17. This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future.

Michael Paterniti

#18. Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity.

Michael Paterniti

#19. I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance - and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs. Admittedly,

Michael Paterniti

#20. A story is time itself, boxed and compressed.

Michael Paterniti

#21. All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating.

Michael Paterniti

#22. Laughing brings out the good in food. It's good to laugh. If you don't laugh, you're going to magnify. And if you magnify, you're going to die.

Michael Paterniti

#23. If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies." I

Michael Paterniti