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“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.”
― Wolf in White Van
― Wolf in White Van
“It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.”
― Wolf in White Van
― Wolf in White Van
“We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.”
― Corelli’s Mandolin
― Corelli’s Mandolin
“I didn’t have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn’t feel abandoned so much as reminded.”
― Wolf in White Van
― Wolf in White Van
“Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It’s fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open that the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas…otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us.”
― Corelli’s Mandolin
― Corelli’s Mandolin
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