Stephanie Cotsirilos > Quotes

“I miss you every hour. In my dreams, I search all over for you, I eat the universe to find you.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“It’s one thing to get by in a language. It’s another to absorb inferences babies learn while growing up. If you didn’t learn English that way, you can miss unspoken rules, especially when you’re caught in brawling American life, from which Xanthi was insulated when she lived with my suburban family outside Chicago. Incomplete acculturation can go very wrong.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Whether she knew it or not, Xanthi prepared me to fight for even my most damaged defendants...”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“This does not concern something official. It concerns our souls, if we have any left.
I have learned over these many years you’ve been away that our minds can alter truth to suit what our hearts will have us believe.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Since we have grown together like figs in a tree, you and I.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“I know the Greek phrase for “I’m sorry” to this day. Sorrow being central to the language.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“He remembers the emptiness of her absence. . . It is inevitable, I suppose, that Niko’s mother is not always there precisely when he needs her. No one’s mother can be. Here, risks are smaller than they were for you, but a child’s heart hurts anyway.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“. . . because she has served men so long in order to survive. She has adopted their methods.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Is survival immoral, Mrs. Helen?'
My young mother did not know how to answer.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“What I know is she came to me in the kitchen after dinner yesterday and embraced me strongly, as though she were my own daughter. For a moment, her body’s warmth made me think I was holding you. I almost screamed with longing. I felt in my endless veins each one of the thousands of miles separating me from you, and my blood flowed fast, rushing to reach you in Greece. My Koula, I miss you every hour. In my dreams, I search all over for you, I eat the universe to find you.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“It is difficult to shock an angel, yet I have done so. I could never believe it.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“When you were little, I would have died for you. It is good to have someone to die for. I watched you grow and thought about my daughter and grandchildren and how different they must be from their photographs or their images in my mind. I wonder what I will encounter when I caress their necks with my calloused hands.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Xanthi had passed through Union Station’s vast Beaux Arts atrium, the Great Hall, magnificent and scary to me as a kid...There she stood in black garments, individual, resilient. Her green eyes anomalous to the Peloponnesus, more common among mountain Greeks. She was like that one blade of grass my dad’s lawnmower couldn’t cut, no matter how many times he went over it. Almost no gray hairs glinted among her dark ones tucked back into a tiny bun. She stepped toward us, pulling out of a movie, away from the first decades of a century pockmarked by war, famine, earthquakes, and a Great Depression denting the hubris of Union Station, colossal behind her.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi

“Xanthi came into my childhood in August of 1954, arriving at Union Station near the Chicago River, final stop in a transatlantic journey to help take care of me and my siblings in suburban Oak Park while Mom underwent treatment, such as it was in those days, for breast cancer metastases. Xanthi was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s, maybe even a distant relative. Didn’t matter to me as a four-year-old boy. Whoever she was related to, she left her home on the Peloponnesus to live with us for room and board and some money to send back home after a string of cataclysms bludgeoning Greece at the time.”
― Stephanie Cotsirilos, My Xanthi