Quotes from Julie Otsuka

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

It's all in the way you breathe.

But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger's backyard, our mother's rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.

She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day.

We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. We stopped writing home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting.?

A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives.

Summer was a long hot dream.

Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you..." she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...

Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. "It's his mother's name," she explained. To which we replied, "So is yours.

Or maybe, it's just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there's no getting them back. That's just how it is.

She remembers that everything she remembers is not necessarily true.

Up there," she says, "I'm just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I'm myself.

Don't touch me," said the girl. "I want to be sick by myself." "That's impossible," said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away

Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty?

There was a man of the cloth—Reverend Shibata of the First Baptist Church—who left urging everyone to forgive and forget. There was a man in a shiny brown suit—fry cook Kanda of Yabu Noodle—who left urging Reverend Shibata to give it a rest.

Above ground, many of us are ungainly and awkward, slowing down with the years.... Down below, at the pool, we are restored to old youthful selves. Grey hairs vanish beneath dark blue swim caps. Brows unfurrow, limps disappear.

We] glide serenely through the water, safe in our knowledge that we are nothing more than a blurry peripheral shape glimpsed in passing through the foggy, tinted goggles of the swimmer in the next lane.

We didn't know. We didn't want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

She remembers that today is Sunday, which six days out of seven is not true.

She remembers that she is forgetting.