Quotes from Chris Bohjalian

Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time." She wanted to believe that; she wanted to believe it almost desperately. She wanted to be different from what she was—to be anything but what she was. But every day that grew less and less likely. Life, it seemed to her in the back of the cab, was nothing but a narrowing of opportunities. It was a funnel.

Too often we presume that the unexpected strangers in our lives bode ill,or we are skeptical of their designs.We think we know more. And while I am well aware that there is indeed all manner of malevolence in the ether,there is benevolence there,too

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.

She needed water, but it would take a tsunami to avert the hangover that awaited. She needed Advil, but she feared the red pills that she popped like M&M's at moments like this were distant. They were in the medicine bag in her own hotel room. In her own hotel.

Do you know people cry on airplanes more than anywhere else?" "I didn't know it was a fact," she answered, "but I might have suspected as much from my years up here." "Yeah, you'd probably know better than me. But on a plane, you're often alone. Or you're stressed. Or you've just had some meaningful experience. Movies and books will really get to you at thirty-five thousand feet.

Drones were such a guy thing, she thought. It was downright chromosomal.

The flu was not a pretty way to die. But then, there really weren't pretty ways to die, unless you were granted that rarest of miracles and died in your sleep.

And just as there is random horror-murder,suicide,child abuse,car accidents.......there is also indiscriminate kindness. Not merely miracles,though I have experienced them.But simple human connection,either brokered by an angel or sourced by one. That is why I try to encourage people to be receptive to that new person who seems to have appeared in their life out of nowhere.

A term came to her that they used on occasion at the shelter: the double bind...They used the expression in much the same way that they would use a term like catch-22.

Don't judge me. I mean that. You have a great husband and two sweet kids—" "They're sixteen and thirteen. They stopped being sweet years ago

She had been told over the years by pilots that the last words of most captains before their aircraft augured into the side of the mountain or broke apart before breaking the plane of the sea were these: MOTHER. MOMMY. MOM

Cashews and poison ivy, pistachio nuts and poison sumac. Mangoes. They all had resinous and sometimes poisonous juice, nuts or fleshy fruit, and small flowers.

She had been told over the years by pilots, usually when they were having a drink, that the last words of most captains before their aircraft augured into the side of the mountain or broke apart before breaking the plane of the sea were these: MOTHER. MOMMY. MOM.

More important, that second question assumes that gender is all about sex, or that sexual preference is at the core of our gender. I can't speak for other transsexuals, but there is no way on God's green earth I would

have become a born-again woman just so the sex would be hot. No orgasm in the world is worth all that electrolysis. Truthfully, I became an external woman because I have always been an internal woman. That's all there is to it.

normalcy bias. We suppose the world will continue to spin the way it always has. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing isn't, in fact, the cataclysm that it is.

You can repair anything but dead. You can't fix that

A moment later, all of the men at the party, stupefied by the way the hooker had gone banshee

And my mom will know what's coming and that she can't win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there's no place left to go. And Mom is already

Perhaps that was the worst kind of monster: the kind who had blue eyes and small constellations of freckles, and yet was humanized by fingers made knobby by injury or illness. The fact was, Hollywood was awash with exactly

She was a woman and she had spent enough time alone on subway platforms or streets late at night to know something was wrong.

Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.

Allah dwells in all men, even the infidel," he says.

Supposedly, whatever we do that's selfish goes with us to the grave; whatever we do that's selfless lives on.