Sara Novic Quotes

#1. The more I lied, the closer I came to fitting in. Sometimes I even believed myself.

Sara Novic

#2. I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

Sara Novic

#3. Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years."
"I hope that's not true", I said.

Sara Novic

#4. As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.

Sara Novic

#5. Communism is fascism, in all practical applications," he was saying now. "Can you think of a Communist country sans dictator?

Sara Novic

#6. Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

Sara Novic

#7. It was as if it never occurred to anyone that blocking the incoming roads was the same as blocking the escape routes.

Sara Novic

#8. The one who preferred her own sorrows to all the joys in the world had enterd the forest and broken the spell

Sara Novic

#9. In the streets we occasionally glimpsed familiar T-shirts within our circles of friends, though we had an unspoken agreement not to mention it. On the weekends we spent our mornings scrubbing the stains from our new old clothes, wringing out each other's memories.

Sara Novic

#10. Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.

Sara Novic

#11. We entered an era of false alarms.

Sara Novic

#12. Somewhere in the dead space between house and shelter civilians became soldiers.

Sara Novic

#13. The first time, the noise that came out of the AK didn't sound like a gunshot. It sounded like a laugh.

Sara Novic

#14. The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

Sara Novic

#15. ...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.

Sara Novic

#16. Worrying isn't rational. No one makes a conscious decision to freak out about something.

Sara Novic

#17. I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

Sara Novic