Quotes from Chris Bohjalian

He moved quickly away from her through the ring, his whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then -- the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back -- he was rising, rising, rising. . . And aloft.

a smart girl is nobody's pushover and nobody's foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile.

But she insists the family hadn't a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us? I really have become quite the Dante scholar: "There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.

The message, if you think about it this way, is all about taking chances because fate or destiny or God will protect you. Take a risk, have a little faith. It's all about life, not death.

She contemplated a mystery: How is it I am humiliated when I am alone? Does not humiliation demand an audience?

It was Aldous Huxley who observed, "Every man's memory is his private literature.

The problem with always having to be right is that sometimes you're not. And so, if you're like me, those times when you're not, you try and save face—especially after you've seriously fucked up. You make one bad decision and then another, trying to fix that very first fuck-up.

I'm not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.

Sometimes I believe we would all be better off if we always treated people like this was the last time we were ever going to see them

She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn't as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.

we were too young- and the ground too muddy- for our small part of the earth to move.

We all look forward, but how we see tomorrow is grounded so deeply in what we lived through just yesterday.

She did it because it was, like so much else that made her happy, dangerous and self-destructive and just a little bit sick.

She feared that she'd missed something, because there were so many parallels with her own story, and she could not help but see in her head the small memories her mind would offer as tantalizing, but—in the end unsatisfying, glimpses of what may have occurred.

She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn't. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.

They studied the way the world changed at morning and dusk and imagined how the sun might fall on the skin of a goddess.

Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.

A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom--I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else--but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.

In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.

At night, when no one's there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there's a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

It's a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind

We are mortal. Nothing that touches us or we touch here is forever. Even rocks are rubbed small by the river.

There were people in the world who were good and people who were evil, but most of them were some mixture of both and did what they did simply because they were mortal. And her Lord? ... He knew it all and had known it all and always would know it all.