Michael Paterniti > Quotes

“In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“After the cafes of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare-- screaming Adore me!-- Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.ll Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn't care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“A story is time itself, boxed and compressed.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren't exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [...]”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“He’d taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“At the same time, Ambrosio had given me a brief glimpse of a different, compelling sort of life, a life in which there seemed to be more time for family and conversation, for stories and food, a life I was desperate to lead now as an antidote to my own. It was okay to squander a day, a week, a year, sitting in that telling room, summoning ghosts, because no one saw it as squandering. No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [...], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“Laughing brings out the good in food. It’s good to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you’re going to magnify. And if you magnify, you’re going to die.”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays

“Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope.”
― Michael Paterniti

“I'll keep these same photographs pinned to a wall above my desk as tiny parables.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“the gossip mill surrounding her and her possible suitors was always grinding. The rumors were so pervasive that she could barely converse with a boy before there were inventions of a torrid affair. This affliction, for that’s what it really was, seemed to place Rosa on the defensive, slowly removing her from some life she might have dreamed for herself, for to have fallen in love, or even let herself go for a night, was to have fulfilled someone else’s pernicious prophecy of her, when quite the opposite was true.”
― Michael Paterniti, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

“It's so deceptively easy to get people to stop trusting their own senses. They cut you off and then put fear in you.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“For these moments in transit, when you ride in the bubble of your own thoughts, without intrusion, moving at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour, everything becomes color and speed and, for a moment, you outrace your own woes.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Or Einstein regenerated, living a life on top of the life he's already led, doomed by the accomplishments of his former self.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“If he was dismissed and despised by the local folk in life, the economics of his immorality have called for his complete resurrection.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“When put to it, I can be an alright conversationalist. But I find openings are always tricky.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate—the perpetual clusters of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Burger King—are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas”
― Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays