Quotes from Michael Paterniti

I feel something I can't quite put my finger on, something euphoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just not hate? Is it joy or just not sadness?

What if I forget her voice?' Sara said. 'You won't,' I said. 'You sound just like her.

In the months to come, we'll buy a house together and get married and have a son--all of it occurring so naturally that we won't even think of ourselves as having given up our freedom, but rather as having more of it.

New Father will go glottal, scrotal, and ballistic on someone driving twenty-seven in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone when Baby is astronauted in the backseat.

You can count on your enemies," said Emilia now, "but sometimes it's the one who smiles who keeps you up at night." There

on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness. In

No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness.

You could travel mile after empty mile seeing nobody, nothing—just the rugged Meseta—and then happen upon an ancient village of a hundred homes, all conjoined and crowded together, enjambed and encircling a church, a castle, each village with its Franco-era frontón, linked, for better or worse, in prayer, in drink, in song. I

Eu as prefera sa beau vin facut de omul care mi-l serveste, fiindca beau persoana insasi. Ma impregnez de fiinta ei, de iubirea ei.

Here where vegetables are scarce—or, it seems, scarcely eaten—there are times when ham (gorgeous, fantastic ham!) is the starter, the vegetable, and the main dish, all in one.

If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies." I

don't know why this little cheese conquered so many," he said softly. "But if you asked me the secret, I'd say it was because we made it in our home, the old way, the way it had been made for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the United States you don't know what it's like to have old flavors, flavors from the past, from centuries before. But we live with them every day here.

In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?

Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

After the cafes of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare-- screaming Adore me!-- Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.ll Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn't care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem.

There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest.

Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.

A story is time itself, boxed and compressed.

Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.

Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [...]

Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!

From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker.

Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [...], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines.