Top 87 Bohjalian Quotes
#1. But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.
Chris Bohjalian
#2. On the one hand, I'm this guy who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to very conservative parents, and the other side of me is fascinated by the peripheries of our culture, maybe because that's where our culture is most in transition and where there's likely to be conflict.
Chris Bohjalian
#3. When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.
Chris Bohjalian
#4. People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.
Chris Bohjalian
#5. You know the type - will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat."
"You're selling yourself short."
"I've just sold myself for rat meat," she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.
Chris Bohjalian
#6. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#7. Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.
Chris Bohjalian
#8. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#9. Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.
Chris Bohjalian
#10. Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially
romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.
Chris Bohjalian
#11. Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.
Chris Bohjalian
#13. I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.
Chris Bohjalian
#14. They studied the way the world
changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess.
Chris Bohjalian
#16. At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.
Chris Bohjalian
#17. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#18. I'm not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.
Chris Bohjalian
#19. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#21. So you're positive the killer is a man."
"Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don't cut out other women's hearts."
"We can.
Chris Bohjalian
#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?) ...
Chris Bohjalian
#23. How the Germans can remain allies with the Turks is beyond me. No European nation would ever commit the sorts of crimes that this regime is blithely committing right now.
Chris Bohjalian
#24. I kind of understood at a young age that I didn't play well with most other kids in the sandbox.
Chris Bohjalian
#25. We were too young- and the ground too muddy- for our small part of the earth to move.
Chris Bohjalian
#26. Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.
Chris Bohjalian
#27. I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.
Chris Bohjalian
#28. Crime? I was in trouble because a man had said I was not clean there. He was lying. He only said that because he was not clean there and I told him we should shower before we fucked.
Chris Bohjalian
#29. He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.
Chris Bohjalian
#30. My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
Chris Bohjalian
#31. The problem with always having to be right is that sometimes you're not. And so, if you're like me, those times when you're not, you try and save face - especially after you've seriously fucked up. You make one bad decision and then another, trying to fix that very first fuck-up.
Chris Bohjalian
#32. I answer two or three letters a day. I'm just not the he-has-a-secretary kind of guy.
Chris Bohjalian
#33. 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
Chris Bohjalian
#34. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#35. And when something wasn't working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.
Chris Bohjalian
#36. Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine ... and then make them plausible.
Chris Bohjalian
#38. It has helped me to understand more about who I am- the geography of my own soul.
Chris Bohjalian
#39. Nothing
and I mean nothing, Carly Banks
is crazy if you're in love.
Chris Bohjalian
#40. I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better ...
Chris Bohjalian
#41. He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.
Chris Bohjalian
#42. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#43. A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.
Chris Bohjalian
#44. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#45. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#46. In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.
Chris Bohjalian
#47. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#48. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#49. Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences.
Chris Bohjalian
#50. We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?
Chris Bohjalian
#51. She would hear the verbal balancing act: urgency mixed like gin amid the tonic of consideration.
Chris Bohjalian
#52. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#53. This was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed.
Chris Bohjalian
#54. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#55. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#56. What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Chris Bohjalian
#57. Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm.
Chris Bohjalian
#58. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#59. In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park.
And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman's family.
Chris Bohjalian
#60. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#61. My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.
Chris Bohjalian
#62. No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.
Chris Bohjalian
#63. I love it when the snowflakes are flying like butterflies.
Chris Bohjalian
#64. As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.
Chris Bohjalian
#65. Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75
Chris Bohjalian
#66. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#68. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#69. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#70. On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.
Chris Bohjalian
#71. Welcomes seclusion. Not precisely antisocial, but reclusive.
Chris Bohjalian
#72. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#73. There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'
Chris Bohjalian
#74. My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
Chris Bohjalian
#75. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#76. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#77. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#78. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
#79. She talks and talks because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.
Chris Bohjalian
#82. 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?
Chris Bohjalian
#84. 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?
Chris Bohjalian
#85. She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.
Chris Bohjalian
#86. My dad and Patricia viewed my decision to become a vegetarian largely in terms of the way it seemed to complicate their dinner menus.
Chris Bohjalian
#87. 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.
Chris Bohjalian
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