Quotes from Chris Bohjalian

This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person's self respect

gentlemen's clubs—now there was a ridiculous euphemism

Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we're either very resilient or super callous. I don't know which.

In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park. And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman's family.

Cruelty may be defined as violence without provocation and discipline that is excessive.

People lose their jobs over this sort of thing. They lose their friends. Their families. They lose everything.

You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat." "You're selling yourself short." "I've just sold myself for rat meat," she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

But if you are a person who needs no one's approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere.

And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.

She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped.

During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.

She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.

but my biggest worry was that he would

Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.

she would convince herself that she wasn't destined for Hell because in all other ways she led a good life. An exemplary life. And though she understood that works alone could not buy one's salvation, the fact that she wanted so desperately to behave well was a favorable indication.

And while envy was a mortal sin, it grew rampant in everyone's soul; it was but a dandelion, a weed that was unstoppable here and one learned to live with. It was a character flaw far less dire than the sort of mean streak that led a man to stab a fork into his wife's hand.

in her heart she feared it was something more: it was a sign. Because, if one looked around carefully, wasn't everything?

it was then that an idea began to form in her mind. It was vague, the details beyond definition. But she was starting to see its contours, like the shore when a ship first spies land on the horizon.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans.

read Carlo Levi?

this was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed.

You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.

My presence scared them. I reminded them of the one thing in the world we want most to forget.