Best 31 quotes of Chris Bohjalian on MyQuotes

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.

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.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

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?

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

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.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

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.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

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?).

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light.

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.

With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom--I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else--but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.

And just as there is random horror-murder,suicide,child abuse,car accidents.......there is also indiscriminate kindness. Not merely miracles,though I have experienced them.But simple human connection,either brokered by an angel or sourced by one. That is why I try to encourage people to be receptive to that new person who seems to have appeared in their life out of nowhere.

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.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

He moved quickly away from her through the ring, his whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then -- the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back -- he was rising, rising, rising. . . And aloft.

In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park. And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman’s family.

Pain came in all colors and sizes, much of it far worse than the pricks and aches and fever dreams that affected the body

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.

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.

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.

This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person's self respect

Though angels were easy to finds in cemeteries, she said that she didn't especially care for funereal angels and tombstone cherubs -- she wanted her angels among the living, not watching over the already dead -- and thus she scoured parks and gardens for the angels with whom, on some level, she wanted to commune.