Daniel Torday > Quotes

“I had only acted and acted and acted and acted, some delusional anti-Hamlet acting instead of thinking. And now every one of my thoughts was retrospective, as if I'd set out on a new life with my gaze cast ever backward.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“We might be able to see God's body in the Kabbalah's ten Sefirot, but it was 1986, barely forty years since our grandparents' generation sat desperate and fated in their East European neighborhoods. Never again, our teachers incanted to us Monday after Monday, Wednesday after Wednesday. But when I picture myself in those rooms in the basement of our shul, even now I can only hear the incantation's reciprocal: It will happen again. Beware. Be always aware.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Sometimes even the most steadfast facts of our lives can be undone by time and chance.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“At times, always unexpected, the flames of the past will come and burn a hole in my day.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Let the Manhattanite baby boomers who could afford it have the Met, have the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Flatiron Building, Central Park. Cassie and Regan and their generation had BAM Café, had Rumble Seat Music, had the Barclays Center, the new waterpark in Prospect Park. They had the youth and they had the numbers. They were ugly but they had the music.”
― Daniel Torday, Boomer1

“The gardner is an unseen force. The better he is at his job - the better he is at making things grow and making it appear as if they've grown on their own - the less he is seen.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“I guess violence seems like a reasonable outcome until it becomes the actual, you know, outcome. At which point it just looks like a stupid horrifying outcome. And terrifying. Whether it's terroristic or not.”
― Daniel Torday, Boomer1

“I do not know if a conversation like this is what it is to be in love - to disagree but to stay around and find out why, so it is no longer a disagreement. To do something so simple as to talk honestly, and then to listen. But I do know it's what it means to begin to know someone: confession, revelation, reconciliation.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Mark's definition of work was more like: doing a thing you love so much, with such artful labor and natural talent, it doesn't matter how much you get paid for that work, or by whom. Or if you get paid at all, even.”
― Daniel Torday, Boomer1

“Some actions you can't take back, Poxl, most of them in fact. Mostly we do things in our lives and they affect the people around us.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“The way smelling decaying leaves for the first time in fall might evoke previous falls, childhood falls, a synaptic palimpsest of trick-or-treatings, the collapsing of time across years into the evocation of memory.”
― Daniel Torday, Boomer1

“Perhaps if I had then, if I'd admitted that feeling, things might have gone differently in the days ahead. But the smallest thing can change us if we let it, and I did not speak. The cloud blew past, left the sun, and our world again warmed.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“We only see what we want when we're in need.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Those memories are far from mind most days, and yet the scratch of their talon leaves its unalterable mark on the skin of daily life.”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“I learned that to live life is to lay oneself down to a wave, to feel as best one could the direction the current was flowing and then allow one's body to go slack and have the wisdom not to fight it lest one drown...”
― Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West

“Resist much, obey little.
Propaganda by the deed.”
― Daniel Torday, Boomer1