Daniel Mason > Quotes

“Can there be art without the human in it? Maybe that is what I wish to capture: beast as seen by beast, tree as seen by tree. I jest, but not really.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“That you are the single person in the world who makes me more than what everyone else sees: that you created me, that in your mind lives the person I wish to be.”
― Daniel Mason, A Far Country

“So much of what I have done is tied to what I will do that at times the truth I have already experienced threatens to vanishe with that which I have yet to see. How to express this to you? Whereas my journey until now has been one of potential, of imagination, now its loss seems to question everything I have seen. I have allowed dreams to melt into my realities, now realitieies threaten to melt to only dreams, to disappear. I don't know if anything I am writing makes sense, but in the face of such beauty around me, I only see myself standing outside our door in Franklin Mews, bag in hand, unchanged from the day I left."
-Edgar, in a letter to his wife (Chp 11)”
― Daniel Mason, L'afinador de pianos

“In comparison to the church, with its constant clamor, the huts had the hushed, sacred air of deathbed scenes, the light barely illuminating the pallid faces of the soldiers, the village women moving slowly in their dark shawls, their children sitting in transfixed vigil by the beds. For these, Margarete always had a crust of bread, a piece of carrot. Sometimes Lucius entertained them by showing them his father’s hand shadows, other times by letting them listen to their hearts. Their wide eyes grew wider with the cold bell of the stethoscope, not seeming to understand what they were hearing, but astonished nonetheless. Manifestly, he did this out of kindness, or a sort of effort at improving relations, though in truth there was something fortifying in the chance to touch skin without gangrene, without fever, the bodies without a wound.”
― Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

“One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor,” said Margarete, when he came to the door, and he didn’t know if she was speaking for him or for herself. Her eyes were red, and he wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He had thought he was inured to death by then, even prided himself on the calmness with which he absorbed the news of the most recent passing. He who had once stared in shock at the frozen soldier without a jaw. But the great Rzedzian’s body seemed horribly small, the stiffening fingers too familiar, and the way his lip drew back over his teeth reminded him of the corpse of an animal.”
― Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

“Yes, Doctor, we remember her. She went to Kraków. No, she went to Jaroslaw. No, to Sambor. So to Stryj. She was from the mountains, Doctor, wasn't she? She was going home, she said.

Perhaps if you go there, they will know.

And on. And he would continue, a ghost searching for its flesh.”
― Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

“È una storia di sogni, gridò, sono tutte storie di sogni.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“Essere necessari non significa essere accettati.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“They left that night, a comet lighting the heavens in the direction of their flight.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“In poche righe le confessava le sue emozioni dicendo di essersi sentito "come nell'Allegro con Brio della Sonata 50 in Re Maggiore di Haydn".”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“Clementi, Sonata in Fa Diesis Minore, Opera 25, Numero 5" disse Katherine, e lui annuì. Una volta le aveva spiegato che quella sonata evocava in lui l'immagine di un uomo perduto in mezzo al mare mentre la sua innamorata lo aspetta sulla riva.”
― Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

“Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. She has come to think of them as her private Archive, herself as Archivist, and she had found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“...this is the kind of straitjacket that I worry most about. It isn't praise, it is a command. When they compliment the cook on his potatoes, its just an order to cook the same thing again.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“History haunts him who does not honour it.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“And she stared into the green that surrounded them, for fear was in her, and loneliness, and she didn't know which one was worse.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening, heavy with the smell of juice and hay--this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousands seasons, of frog song, of thunderheads, of first thaws, that hid within the canonical four.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“I have come to the opinion, generally, that he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“In sum: I can live like this, and if I must endure the distance, it is as one can live through winter knowing spring will come.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“He now understood why one might die for someone else. It wasn't mercy; it was torture to remain.”
― Daniel Mason

“...the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods: A Novel

“My sprite! he called his lover in the shelter of the darkness, and she looked back into his eyes. He was mad, she thought, naked but for his scraps of clothing, his axe, his clucking hen. And how he talked! Of Flora, the dominion of the toad and muck-clam, the starscapes of the fireflies, the reign of wolf and bear and bloom of mold. And around them, in the forest, everywhere: the spirits of each bird and insect, each fir, each fish.”
― Daniel Mason

“the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“one did not need to believe in an afterlife to feel some outrage at those who so swiftly cast away the past.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“When he turned, at last, to theory, one thing was clear: he did not intend to destroy faith; he intended to explain the shaping of a beetle’s horns. Should faith fall in the process, he thought (and then thought about it no more), it was a matter for theologians to resolve.”
― Daniel Mason

“They had come to the spot in te freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs.

For a moment, a stillness hangs over the rubble, and then it all begins again.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Drank a little in the daytime, Janet did. Often called him for something in the pool, but it had always vanished by the time he got there. Of course, he had his suspicions why she was really calling. His voice rose in a falsetto: Mr. Osgood, however might I reward your services? Yes, once a rumor got out that a gent's still got some gristle in his sausage, half the lasses in the county had a muskrat in their pool.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“In the mornings, she walks outside, where once they walked together. Wears his jacket, his scarf, his mittens. The snow knee-deep in places, but it doesn't stop her. Before, she carried the two of them through worse.
She goes because it is the only place where she can bear his absence. Because the cold, the treacherous path: they make their own demands, distract her from her secret.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“But the place is rank with Time—why shouldn’t I wish to scrape away the strata?”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“Did he know where he was going, she asked him, pulling him to her, tasting his mouth, and always he answered, Away! North they went, to the north woods and then toward sun-fall, trespassing like fire, but the mountains bent their course and the bogs detained them, and after a week they could have been anywhere. Did it matter?”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods