Bob Shacochis > Quotes

“I should like to elbow aside the established pieties and raise my martini glass in salute to the mortal arts of pleasure.”
― Bob Shacochis

“It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others. —Fernando Pessoa”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he’d say—he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul. At the intersection ahead they could see”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“He had come to understand that we choose the lies in which we participate and, in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time, perhaps forever”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“the definition of grace was to be at peace with what you did not know because you could not.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“His arm came tentatively across her side to hug her breasts and she sighed so long and deeply and with such intense relief that when the sigh in fact ended she was still tucked under the lovely arching bridge of his arm and it was morning.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay”
― Bob Shacochis, Kingdoms in the Air: Dispatches from the Far Away

“And how could she ever open her mouth to tell him, in the guise of reminiscing, I haven't been on a ferry in twelve years. Once upon a time I was a girl and my name was Dottie and I was seventeen and in love and I was real. I had a life that I loved and it was beautiful and the boy was beautiful and here I am again but once was enough, once is all you get to ask for, once is about all I can survive.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“I want you so much, he said with such heart-tugging sincerity that to be fair, a translation from Turkish to English would have to flip a coin between "want" and "love.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“It almost felt like too much, just by the sad weight of its being so little.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. —Winston Churchill”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“Always on the boat there was an inner breeze of excitement, a happy gratitude for the water and its strong promising scents, the Nymph’s proud sail set against the sliding panorama of facing continents and their ghostly empires, crusted one atop the other like gobs of paint on a giant canvas.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“Yeah, what’s new, a typical case of brass myopia, nothing personal, never a reason for an officer to pay attention to an enlisted joe unless he wants his ass licked or is experiencing some Zulu impulse to ram a spear through your chest.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“--perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low sometimes lost their humanity--”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

“He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction.”
― Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul