Quotes from Ari Berk

What is it about traveling by night that makes even a short journey strange and a little wonderful? Momentary lights appear and pass across the windowpane so fast they burst suddenly into view before becoming patterns of the past, stars that grow ever more distant as they follow their opposite course away from the car as it hurtles on its way through the darkness.

Just as you cannot wave your hands and reappear in your simple life before coming here, so you cannot merely clap them to wake up the dead from their troubles.

He could feel his father's history like ruts worn deep in the road.

The hours must be endured and those who cannot do so in life will most surely do so in death. You say you cannot face them? Life's joys and pains both? You shall find them waiting for you, a world of ignored moments there to be explored. Then shall you know how long an hour can be, shall feel the awful depth and restlessness of even a single day, and all the days you fled from life while you were alive.

People are not alone in making art. Even the smallest animals can create things of beauty. Even the smallest animals have power and can help set things right in the world. Beautiful things are being made all the time and can still work great wonders. A tiny web of silk, a small jar of earth, can hold a glowing ember of the sun to help light the world.

Imagine standing in a room in a large museum. As you look around the dimly lit gallery, you begin to recognize shapes: a basket, an arrow, a beautifully decorated carving, a shield. Some of the objects are unrecognizable to you. What if these objects could speak? What would they tell you about themselves? How have they been used? Where did they come from? How did they get to this museum? Whom do they belong to?

In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.

He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.

I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.

that heaven might be no further afield than the hearts of those people who remember us with love.

Love is fragile and rare and cannot live long in open air.

Or maybe a ghost was only a thing that endures, like the furnishings of this room, like the chairs or table; a little worse for wear, but still here because someone cherished it, or because it was made of such hardy stuff that time couldn't wear it down fast enough.

To get ahead, sometimes you had to retrace your steps.

Here, in this house, her recollections glowed like embers on the hearth, and each night, in their warmth, she'd take a memory or two down from the shelf and dance with them for a while.

Most people give little enough real thought to their own mortality. Oh yes, they gabble on about heaven and the bosom of Abraham, but really, they are weary of life almost from the time they're born, and are only waiting for it all to end. They live their days quietly, obscurely, and underneath their daily toils, they long for oblivion.

Dolores liked that story. Men were wolves and practical women took the knife to them, and those wolves, those sharp-toothed men, they didn't come back after that.

For when we read, don't we summon the past into the present? Hold out our hand and invite an author to sit with us for a time?

Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you.

Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.

He had become a character in a play, same story, over and over.

Besides, love flourishes best in ignorance…or in absence.

She could feel the common blood song inside the place, the chorus of ancestors moving about in familiar constellations.

Worry can pull a person's face into a mask of anxious lines, and he could tell she'd had some of that, but even worried folks could laugh.

Little things like time and generations don't matter very much with good friends who are fond of each other's company.