Ari Berk > Quotes

“In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“And that’s the worst of it, the part no one ever tells you about.”

“What part?” he said, his voice still clenched with grief.

“How it never stops. How the pain of missing people never stops. When you burn your finger in a fire, it hurts, but it only hurts one way because you know what caused the pain and why the pain is there, and you know that it will settle, in a bit. But heart pain has facets, Silas. A thousand different sides, sharp and hard; most of them you don’t even know exist, even when you’re looking straight at them. When someone leaves, or dies, or doesn’t love you in return, well, you may think you know why your heart hurts. But wrapped in there are a hundred kinds of fear all tangled in a knot you can’t untie. Nobody wants to be alone. We all fear being left alone, being left behind. I know such things exist. But you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence. You must learn to make mourning into memory. For once a person takes leave of his life, that life becomes so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping. The dead find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone. But people forget the power of memory. So we fear death in the deepest place of our very being, because we don’t know that memories make us immortal. We focus instead on being gone and the awful mystery behind absence. Love and death—and those two are very closely bound together—scare us because we can’t control them. We fear what we can’t control. That fear is really part of what makes us human, but mostly, we’re just afraid of the ends of stories we can’t foresee.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us. ”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“...that heaven might be no further afield than the hearts of those people who remember us with love.”
― Ari Berk

“Love is fragile and rare and cannot live long in open air.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Or maybe a ghost was only a thing that endures, like the furnishings of this room, like the chairs or table; a little worse for wear, but still here because someone cherished it, or because it was made of such hardy stuff that time couldn't wear it down fast enough.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Here, in this house, her recollections glowed like embers on the hearth, and each night, in their warmth, she’d take a memory or two down from the shelf and dance with them for a while.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“To get ahead, sometimes you had to retrace your steps.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Most people give little enough real thought to their own mortality. Oh yes, they gabble on about heaven and the bosom of Abraham, but really, they are weary of life almost from the time they’re born, and are only waiting for it all to end. They live their days quietly, obscurely, and underneath their daily toils, they long for oblivion.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Dolores liked that story. Men were wolves and practical women took the knife to them, and those wolves, those sharp-toothed men, they didn’t come back after that.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“For when we read, don’t we summon the past into the present? Hold out our hand and invite an author to sit with us for a time?”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you.”
― Ari Berk, Nightsong

“Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Besides, love flourishes best in ignorance…or in absence.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together. His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“He had become a character in a play, same story, over and over.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Worry can pull a person’s face into a mask of anxious lines, and he could tell she’d had some of that, but even worried folks could laugh.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Stories wander around, go from one land to another, sometimes parts change.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“And somewhere, buried away deep inside him, a hidden chamber of his heart opened.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Why? I mean, how could you know? I don’t understand.”

“Nothing to understand. There is no great mystery in friendship. You brought yourself here, just as I brought myself here to wait for you. I don’t even mind that you’ve kept me waiting.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Old pain was heavy in the heart, hard to move, and anyway, Dolores Umber kept a tight hold of her pains and grievances. She thought her pain was the last thing she really owned, the last thing that she could keep all to herself. Her very own thing, and she didn’t much care for the idea of someone else trying to take that away from her too.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“She could feel the common blood song inside the place, the chorus of ancestors moving about in familiar constellations.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Of course, not all journeys are undertaken for sacred purposes. Some people may undertake journeys for the simplest reason of all: curiosity. They wish to see what there is to see just beyond the next hill, or over the far river, or at the end of the long trail leading towards dawn....”
― Ari Berk, Coyote Speaks: Wonders of the Native American World

“To love you is her nature. But hers is a love from which no good may come. And your desire for her will lead only to cold, dark places.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Honest error may play prologue to wonders.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Little things like time and generations don’t matter very much with good friends who are fond of each other’s company.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Silas knew words could have power behind them. Usually it was just a sort of bad luck. He also knew, very early on, that you could never tell when that bad luck would jump up to claim its due, so it was best to be careful. Quiet was safer. He wished his parents had been quieter when they were together. Who knew what might happen when you said something awful to someone else? It was hard to take some words back. Some words stuck and you couldn’t shake them off. Silence was better than those kinds of words. Silas had learned that lesson the hard way.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“For didn’t everyone have secret parts and shadows?”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch

“Though you may be a wanderer, living out your days in exile, home is with you always, in blood-song and bone map, and in the echo of your mother’s voice as you tell her favorite tale to your children or the children who gather around you in the land of your exile. Home is your most constant companion.”
― Ari Berk, Death Watch