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The book’s prologue contains the most thrilling and vivid description of a dust storm I’ve ever read. Now, as Song approaches her 17th birthday, life in Massachusetts during wartime is full of adaptations, loss and unknowns. I’m learning so much about life during WWII in a town not far from where I live. And experiencing this time through Song and her family and friends gives a cinema verite feeling.

Arash Shirazi, Cyrus’s uncle, thinks on enlisting in Iran in 1984 for an ongoing war:
“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

Orkideh’s words were still orbiting Cyrus’s skull..as he walked away from the ..[museum]. Earth martyrs, Persian checkboxes. The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die..
Cyrus’s holey shoes were flaunting something too: his authenticity, his class antipathy, his allegiance to the proletariat—it was..right there at his feet…they were ratty flags made by a billion dollar shoe company…

“So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like…a poetic martyr field guide?” asked Zee.
“…..my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally..meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? …was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her.

“For as long as he could remember, Cyrus had thought it unimaginably strange, the body’s need to recharge nightly… As if to incentivize the whole ordeal, the body offered you dreams. In exchange for a third of your living, you were offered sprawling feasts, exotic adventures, beautiful lovers, wings. Or at least the promise of them, made only slightly less intoxicating by the curious threat of nightmare.”

In traveling halfway across the world to Sydney, I had done all that I could to put the past behind me, but I knew now that this was impossible. I could be in France, Australia, or England, I could find myself living on Mars, but no matter where I was, those beautiful scars that Kurt had spoken of would always drag me back to that other place. I could never escape it.

“I felt as if all the life had disappeared from my eyes. Once, when I was a girl in Berlin, Grandmother had told me that they were my best feature, that men would fall in love with me because of them, and, in my vanity, I had longed for the day she would be proved right. Now they were the color of barbed wire, of rusty ovens, of smoke and ash.

This is so much fun!

Perhaps it was from thinking about him after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

Miss Iris said, “Honey, I loved your uncle Andrew. We’ll miss him, won’t we?” She bit her underlip and looked away.
Some of the others said things too. It was a little as though they wanted to ensure that their love would last by telling it to somebody young.

For a long time then I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content, thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else.
[I can feel Berry’s presence in these words, reliving his childhood]

When I got out to the deep place I sucked in a big breath and dived. Way down where the water was black and cold it was revealed to me that if I drowned before I lived to be grown I would be sorry, and I kicked and stroked at the dark, watching the water brighten until my head broke out into daylight and air again.
I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my mother’s fears made me feel absolved..

“Catherine listened with astonishment; she knew not how to reconcile two such very different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been brought up…to know to how many idle assertions and impudent falsehoods the excess of vanity will lead. Her own family were plain, matter-of-fact people who seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father, at the utmost, being content with a pun and her mother with a proverb.”

How do you draw noise, Mr Lloyd? How do I paint the clangour of battle between ocean and land, sea and rock? The sounds reverberating against the stone, cracking the air? The raucousness of gulls? Of terns? I draw them open-beaked, but still they are silent. (young James thinking to himself while drawing and painting at the cliffs)

Bean Ui Fhloinn, the matriarch:”There’s a harshness everywhere, I know, city or country, but here it is more exposed, stripped bare by the weather and our isolation. That simplicity doesn’t suit a lot of people. They say it bores them, but I have watched. It’s not boredom, JP. It’s fear. The barrenness and rawness frightens them.. In..places with trees and shelter the baseness of life is easier to disguise.

This is going to be fierce. I can feel it already.

“He closed his sketchbook and walked back up the cliff path to his cottage. He returned the kitchen chair to the slate slab and sat down, uncertain of what to do next, of how to wait in a place where nothing happens.”

I looked up the word idiomatic in a different dictionary. Thrilling to me, the variety. Thrilling both to know and to not know, to be gifted possibilities…
Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages all touching on each other…acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other…disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.