Tatjana Soli Quotes

#1. Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.

Tatjana Soli

#2. The hardest thing was to give meaning to what appeared to have none.

Tatjana Soli

#3. The only tangible evidence of the enemy's existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.

Tatjana Soli

#4. She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather, that they fell in love through repitition, just the way someone became brave.

Tatjana Soli

#5. What was the point of living through history if you didn't record it?

Tatjana Soli

#6. We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even.

Tatjana Soli

#7. Too many heroes in my life. All gone.

Tatjana Soli

#8. Long ago she had become more ambitious than feeling. She had fallen in love with images instead of living things. Except for Linh.

Tatjana Soli

#9. Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable - its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hoevering doom.

Tatjana Soli

#10. Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given.

Tatjana Soli

#11. Ard to trust that after so much had been taken, so much could still be received.

Tatjana Soli

#12. Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

Tatjana Soli

#13. Helen didn't yet understand that conjuring up the future was the duty of the living, what they owed to the dead.

Tatjana Soli

#14. It had always fascinated her - what happens when things break down, what are the basic units of life?

Tatjana Soli

#15. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.

Tatjana Soli

#16. Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.

Tatjana Soli

#17. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.

Tatjana Soli

#18. She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.

Tatjana Soli

#19. Pictures could not be accessories to the story
evidence
they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.

Tatjana Soli

#20. A woman sees war differently.

Tatjana Soli

#21. What are the boundaries of charity? When started, where does it morally end?

Tatjana Soli

#22. She was his country; she was what he would miss until they were back together.

Tatjana Soli

#23. She had broken, become something else. She didn't know what yet. Could you love someone in the process of changing? She did love Linh. As much as a ghost loved. The mind treacherous.

Tatjana Soli

#24. Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.

Tatjana Soli