Quotes from Chris Bohjalian

When this war was over, he and his family--all Germans--were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

Thursday night.

months earlier with Kristin

sword of Damocles

Too often you couldn't mine the recollections that might keep you sane, but instead held close the memories that someday would kill you.

Did you ever read Carlo Levi?" "No." "You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. 'The future has an ancient heart.' I think I have that right.

I love it when the snowflakes are flying like butterflies.

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

Where do you go when the part of your brain that controls judgment is asleep, but the part that controls your motor activity is awake?

Even the most successful people in this world make mistakes. Often they're just better at correcting them and moving on.

Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.

crime? I was in trouble because a man had said I was not clean there. He was lying. He only said that because he was not clean there and I told him we should shower before we fucked.

Some are just businessmen.

But I know well that no good ever comes from mistaking manners for kindness.

Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the theme from Gilligan's Island? Not kidding, this is totally legit.

Becoming a flight attendant was at once rebellion and escape

You can repair anything but dead. You can't fix that. So you bury the dead an move on.

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

scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched.

Hollywood producer's screening room.

She'd learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word cloistered. And that meant something else. Something more. Separation. Isolation. Purity, maybe. The

She closed her eyes against the shame, the disgust. She tried to remind herself that this was just who she was—how she was—and to ratchet down at least a little bit the self-loathing. Hadn't they had fun last night? Of course they had. At least she presumed they had.

So you're positive the killer is a man." "Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don't cut out other women's hearts." "We can.

Seriously," the banker went on, "what do you investigate? I have a feeling you do more than find stray kittens and bring home lost babies." "Murder.