Diana Marcum > Quotes

“There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that they say has no translation. It’s bigger than homesickness or missing someone. It’s a yearning that can be expressed in no other language. It is, as one Azorean friend puts it, “a strictly Portuguese word.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Home—it seemed like a fragile idea to me. Is it where we’re from or where we are?”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“America has long been divided between those who believe its strength lies in diversity and those who are afraid of outsiders and blame social ills on whoever is in the latest wave of migrants.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“marriage works best when people live in separate countries.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“For all our talk about living in the moment, what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“When you go on an adventure, just trust that you’ll meet who you need to meet and hear what you need to hear because the really important stuff, you just can’t plan.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Mark Twain mentioned the Azores in The Innocents Abroad but only to say, “Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“The Tenth Island is what you carry inside you. It’s what’s left when everything else falls away. Those of us who live between worlds just know the Tenth Island better. No matter where I have lived—I have never left my island.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I attended a wedding once where the officiant said that monogamy wasn’t about staying in love with the same person but falling in and out of love with the same person many times over. At the time, I’d felt sorry for his wife, who was standing next to me. Now, I think he may have been onto something.”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“When you don’t know what to do—do the thing in front of you,” she had said.”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“THE PAPER-CUT THEORY This theory holds that the tiny cuts made by bad bosses, broken romances, and the like sting more than real grief. It’s the difference between a deep throbbing wound and a paper cut. Our fingers have more nerves near the surface because that’s how we explore the world. So it hurts like hell when paper slices us. At the same time, scientists believe that our bodies know it’s not really life-threatening, so all the natural protective mechanisms, such as endorphins and bleeding, don’t kick into gear. And since paper is microscopically ragged, it leaves a jagged cut. Unlike the clean slice of a razor, which can kill us.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I wish I could figure out the rules that the universe follows for catching you when you jump off a cliff. There seems to be some sort of caveat that the life rafts won’t line up until after you’re hurtling through the air spread out for a belly flop.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“THE IMPORTANCE OF DAWDLING THEORY”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Recent archaeology finds suggest there may have been even earlier, unknown inhabitants who disappeared before the Portuguese arrived, raising the question of how people got to the middle of the ocean before the known advent of sailing ships.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“DIVING BOARD NOTES Odie tells Albert, a friend the family knew back in Iran, that I had a cocktail party, and they met my Armenian writer friend, and she found him intelligent and smokin’ hot. Odie is perfectly fluent in English, but connotation can still trip her up. A while back, I told her that when Americans think someone is nice-looking, they say, “smokin’ hot.” Albert’s twenty-two-year-old son seated next to me whispers, “She thinks he’s smoking hot?” I whisper back, “She also thinks you and I are smoking hot. It’s her phrase.” Albert, on the other side of me, whispers, “You are smoking pot?” Patrick, across from me, listening through the din, says, “No, I don’t like smoking pot.” Armen, a little hard of hearing, says to Patrick, “You like smoking pot?!” Albert whispers to me, “Pot is not so bad. I like Scotch better.” Odie, oblivious to their side conversations, finishes her recounting with a flourish: “And he’s such a good writer!”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“he wanted Fallen Stones to be there for their children and their children’s children. “Do you think the world will last that long?” I asked, giving away my anxieties. “Much longer,” said Sebastian. “The decision we must make is: What kind of world?”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“But São Jorge startled me. From the ferry it looked like a towering emerald fortress ringed by waterfalls. It was a steep, secretive island.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Something my father always told me was that the trick to success is to know when you have enough and stop and appreciate it.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“In California, every spring weekend, somewhere in a Portuguese community, they are dishing out free soup. It’s a deeply spiritual rite but not a Catholic one, something seldom realized.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“repeatedly in their life. Mine is: “Ice cream is a force for good in a morally ambiguous world.” Source: anonymous, spotted in a Ben & Jerry’s store circa 1993.”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“But a friend of mine whose husband died has a theory that there are four chambers in the human heart—so even if one belongs for eternity to someone missing, there is still room for love.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“monogamy wasn’t about staying in love with the same person but falling in and out of love with the same person many times over.”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“Stories almost always begin with a person at their low point.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Here’s to nothing,” he said. “That’s when anything can happen.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I have thought about a DNA test. But I don’t like the idea, because I think it shouldn’t matter. I’m a proponent of a one-race sorting system: human.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“part of an e. e. cummings poem—the closest thing to a hymn that I have memorized: i thank You God for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“force for good in a morally ambiguous world.” Source: anonymous,”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way