Natalie’s Reviews > The Island of Missing Trees > Status Update

“There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote—the right fable at the right time—they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality. There was no point in telling them that life was more complicated than that and words less magical than they presumed.”

“In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.“

“Some days she was full of confidence and expectation, others she managed just fine, but then there were days, and especially nights, when she would hear, somewhere in the distance, ticking as steady as a metronome, the approaching footsteps of a familiar sense of melancholy. She felt guilty for feeling this way, and she blamed, judged and berated herself endlessly for it.”

“Perhaps in a world bound with rules and regulations that made little sense, and usually privileged a few over the money, madness was the only true freedom.”

“Humans, especially the victors, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favorite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past.”

“You don’t put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don’t lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood.

You don’t fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet here they were, the two of them.“

“Parents, especially those as distracted as her father, desperately needed things to run smoothly and were so inclined to believe the system they had created was working fine that they assumed a normality even when surrounded by clues to the contrary.”