Arabella N > Recent Status Updates

“I’m not special,” I say. “I think I’m just tired.”

“The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world - the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu - relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.”

“Ring, ring. Fuck it. Sometimes when Saturn calls, you just gotta answer.”

The Houdini of Bogo Road wasn’t as magical as he was sneaky and confident and a confident sneak can make his own magic.

I love her Irish accent. I want to go to Ireland right now with this woman and lie in rich green grass by a cliff's edge and eat boiled potatoes with salt and butter and pepper and speak with an Irish accent about how anything is possible for thirteen-year-old boys with Irish accents.

"Thinking evil thoughts and doing evil deeds are two very different things,' Slim says.

I'm a good man, Slim says. 'But I'm a bad man too. And that's like all men, kid. We all got a bit o' good and a bit o' bad in us. The tricky part is learnin' how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don't

“She could have promised the very meaning of life at the end of every one of those pop sticks and she still would have made $6.50 over eight hours.”

Been reading this slowly and steadily, sometimes rereading pages because one sentence will be a whole paragraph

"You're mistaken, Selena. This kind of trauma isn't something you ever get over. You simply learn to live with it," the old man interrupted.”

He’s wrong, it's much more American than people think, Selena .Enslaved parents saw their children ripped away from them and sold of. Native Americans had their children taken away to become "civi-lized' in horrific state-run orphanages. Thousands of those kids died of contagious illnesses and malnutrition, then were buried in unmarked graves.
"You're right, Samuel. Here only white children are considered sacred."

“He tolerated very few people, but he hid it so well that he'd earned a reputation as a friendly guy.”

“….Nostalgia and anguish were the most overarching emotions of those years. He lived a fragmented childhood, divided between the harsh present that he wished to escape and the nebulous fantasy of a family and home, which nourished his ever-fading memories of a mythic past.”

“For Samuel, that painful pilgrimage was inevitable. His roots had been amputated the moment he'd set foot on the Kindertransport train. He had lost his parents and grandparents without any proper goodbye or logical explanation. He had grown up waiting….”

This book is healing

“The painful memories that had been stored in a secret chamber of his heart came rushing back: the shouts, the smoke, the fear, his mother, so lovely and so sad, bidding him farewell from the station, and also old Colonel Volker in his uniform, pinning a magic medal of courage in his coat.”

“None so blind as those who will not see, right?"

"Do you ever think you might be creating a legend around Miss Nadine?"
"We all have the right to make up our own legends."
"I don't need to make mine up, sir."

“I'm going to go with Miss Selena and I can take Didi; you can come with us too, Claudia. But no crying. We have to be good. No, we're not lost. The wind knows my name. And yours too. Everyone knows where we are.”

"Women face a lot of danger on the road— they can be raped, kidnapped, killed. No one investigates the crimes, as if these women were simply disposable. I warned my sister what it would be like.”

“And so that's what they did that night and the other two they shared. They simply loved each other.”

“….He hadn't stopped thinking about her since that December morning when she'd barged into his life and tangled him up in a desperate mis sion that seemed as impossible as trying to stop the tide.”

“From the moment they'd met to board the plane at the Los Ange les airport, when he saw her in her faded jeans, her horrendous Frida Kahlo T-shirt, and the misshapen bag from Guatemala that served as her carry-on, he'd accepted, with a sigh of resignation, that he was in love. Now, amid the lilies and crickets, he understood that he'd been in love with her from the day he first met her in San Francisco…”

“Selena felt languid, as if her body were melting into the lounge chair, her bones made of cotton, her eyelids heavy, with sweat under her arms, dampness between her legs, and the invasive fragrance of tropical flowers in her nostrils.”

"No one in this world is ever truly safe, Frank. We could all just as easly find ourselves in similar situations," Selena had said to him, bu he couldn't imagine anyone he knew falling into such dire cir-cumstances. When he talked to his mother about it, she reminded him
ing the Sicilian mafia,
tat his grandparents had themselves come to the United States flee”

“If I'd have had a fit like that at Tita Edu's, she would ve stuck my head in a bucket of cold water and that would have been the end of it, that always worked. But luckily that's not allowed here; if someone did that to a kid, they'd take them to jail. I wonder why. It's much worse to make kids stay in the hielera or take them away from their mamas, don't you think, Claudia?”

“Samuel was not a man inclined to poetry, but he always thought that weaving was a beautiful metaphor for his wife's personality. She went through life collecting and weaving together stories and people, just as she collected and weaved the threads of many colors for her tapestries.”

“He tried, at first, to keep pace with her, but that proved impossible. In the end he resigned himself to trailing behind, admiring the elliptical arc of her life, so different from his own.”

“Her parents made a huge scene over her plans to shack up with a man before marrying him but she simply bid them a cheerfal goodbye and marched off in a bright periwinkle dress and matching hat that set off her golden skin tone, with no luggage besides a small satcase.”