Quotes from Chris Bohjalian

It has helped me to understand more about who I am- the geography of my own soul.

I kind of understood at a young age that I didn't play well with most other kids in the sandbox.

Ah, the Devil Herself. We really do not know whether the Devil wears breeches or a skirt, now do we?

Nothing -- and I mean nothing, Carly Banks -- is crazy if you're in love.

Now, the separation between depression and suicide is more crevasse than chasm.

We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?

words are just words. Some are better than others, but only because they are better at explaining what you mean.

Signs, after all, were everywhere; it was just a question of knowing how to read them.

Serafina may think I'm a crazy person, but I'm not. She has her scars, too—and not only the ones I saw when she turned her head and her hair fell aside. We are both living out our lives in a Purgatorio. The difference? I arrived from the Paradiso, once young and married and so in love. But Serafina, she who was born alone in a fever dream of fire? She whose very skin is a tapestry of loss? Serafina, of course, arrived from the Inferno.

I am a raft of secrets, she thought, and she imagined herself on timbers from a shipwreck, the water around her endless in all directions.

I have heard it argued that prayer does not change God's mind; rather, it changes us." "The act." "Yes, the act." "I will ponder that idea.

A small thing, yes, but the world was rich with small things that in truth were signs of great importance.

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.

Yes, she thought, revenge belongs to God. But justice? That will be mine.

The plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.

She would hear the verbal balancing act: urgency mixed like gin amid the tonic of consideration.

we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.

If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would turn from sod to stone, and it would seem as if they were walking inside a crag in a cliff. The sky would be reduced to a thin swath of blue, broken in parts by the branches of the trees that grew above them along the sides of this ancient channel.

Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time.

That is where love and lamentation chance upon one another, and that is where we find God.

As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

She talks and talks because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.

there is nothing that frightens that man more than a woman who does not live happily under a man's thumb.

sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.