Sara Nović > Quotes

“...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. they asked because they hadn't smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of singed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn't fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it, parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“He took her by the wrists and held her own hands out before her. She looked down at her palms and understood - her being was implied, her potential thoughts and feelings coursing through her body, the names of everything she knew and those she didn't yet, all in the perpetual existence in her fingertips.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Being motherless was different than being fatherless. It was primal, the archetype for human suffering, like losing the North Star.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“You should know that your food aid does not reach the people it's supposed to. In the place where I stayed, there were no Peacekeepers, and the Četniks stole the aid meant for civilians. If you drop the food and leave, you're just feeding your enemy. We had guns, but they had more. Firepower is the only thing that determines who eats.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“So please, don’t judge me. There is no one more disappointing to me than myself.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Of course, that was their privilege-to conflate majority with superiority.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“But language bears more than the work of communicating with the mainstream world; it is also the internal vehicle for our thoughts and feelings, the mechanism through which we understand ourselves. Without first having had ASL, I would not have understood myself as a person with a story to tell.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Nine out of ten deaf kids had hearing parents, and those parents held Deaf fate in their hands—the fate of their own children, of course, and the future of the Deaf community at large. Problem being, most parents understood deafness only as explained to them by medical professionals: as a treachery of their genes, something to be drilled out.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Kept apart from one another, deaf children frequently receive not only substandard education without full access to language, but a suppressed understanding of the self that can only be righted by representation and a sense of larger community belonging.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“It was hard to imagine what the world might be like if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people's inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or , hell the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege--to conflate majority with superiority.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“In the beginning, adults operating somewhere between concern and nosiness had asked questions about the war, and I spoke truthfully about the things I'd seen. But my descriptions were often met with an uncomfortable shining of eyes, as if they were waiting for me to take things back, to say that war or genocide was actually no big deal. They'd offer their condolences, as they'd been taught, then wade through a polite amount of time before presenting an excuse to end the conversation.

Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. They asked because they hadn't smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of signed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn't fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“The fact that he had done this many times before mitigated the length of the homesickness, but not its intensity.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It did sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages had been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“She would learn as much as she could and do whatever she could to dismantle all that she knew to be broken, brick by brick, by hand if she had to. She would keep the bricks, though. She would use them to build something new.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“The more I lied, the closer I came to fitting in. Sometimes I even believed myself.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Worrying isn't rational. No one makes a conscious decision to freak out about something.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Ana—Ana, listen to me.' A shot. 'We're going to play a game, okay? We're going to trick the guards.' A shot. 'They're drunk—it'll be easy if you pay attention. All you have to do is stay close to me, very close—' A shot. 'Then when I fall down into the hole, you fall at the same time. Just close your eyes and keep your body straight.' A shot. 'But it won't work unless we both fall at the very same time, okay?' A shot. 'Do you understand? Don't! Don't look at me.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“It was as if it never occurred to anyone that blocking the incoming roads was the same as blocking the escape routes.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“We entered an era of false alarms.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“That was the problem with hearing people -- you never could tell when they were paying attention.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“The first time, the noise that came out of the AK didn’t sound like a gunshot. It sounded like a laugh.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“What cruel disease, she thought, to steal from a person all their best moments, and make them relive the worse ones nightly. To force their loved ones to deliver these blows of memory until they, too, were subsumed by the echoing grief.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Her teachers called them “behaviors,” as if any action from a child beyond total compliance was implicitly bad.”
― Sara Nović, True Biz

“Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life there wasn’t difficult enough to warrant an adult’s belief in magic.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War

“Somewhere in the dead space between house and shelter civilians became soldiers.”
― Sara Nović, Girl at War