A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena Quotes

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

He was losing her incrementally...As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.

For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric.

I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.' 'If you step on a land mine,' Akhmed said, "the crutch becomes the leg.

Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It's called evolution.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain.

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

Don't insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is a crustacean on its mother's side.

What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.

They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers

No one can take what's inside your head once it's there.

Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.

Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.

Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.

I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown.

You can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man,'Laina said,... 'You know that song?' 'Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn't know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur'an.

Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving.

There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.

The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink.

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood.

...saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.

The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor peculiarities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.

Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor.

...she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence - of fear, of pain, of grief - but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness.

I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.

Maybe we try to find them in other people. In kindness and generosity; those things don't disappear.

She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn't let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers.

She knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse.

the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect.

You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?' he asked. She had to be putting him on. 'He just stepped down and George Bush became president.' 'And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him from seizing power?' 'No,' she said. 'I think they were friends.' 'Friends?' he asked. 'It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.' 'Good point.

He had learned well: made a board of the village, a pawn of the master.

Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is." "Very soon I'll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Too young to explain in words, the girl's face was old enough to show the loss that was that name.

When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.

... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.

Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable.

Carrying that lumber the forty meters from the forest had left his knuckles blistered, his underarms sopping, but now a few hours of flames had lifted what had taken him months to design, weeks to carry, days to build, all but the nails and rivets, all but the hinges and bolts, all into the sky.

But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn't have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja's life.

She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns

If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you'll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.

Kilometers above, men who didn't know her name wanted to kill her

Even as a child she had hated children; she still did.

This incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.

To live with dignity meant a premature death.

You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.

Pulling back a stray lock of hair, she drew a question mark around her ear. p. 314

The previous night, for the first time in a long time, he had felt whole, and his eyes returned to the rearview, where his dignity was held within a few square centimeters of glass.

He was in love and thus capable of infinite hate. Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.

Who wins? The Americans or the Russians?” “Both,” his father said, glancing to the frost-filled windowpane. “Then who loses?” “Everyone else.

..she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from lost and found....The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline.

We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.

Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.

You shouldn't rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.

Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.” For

She was as hard to pin down as the last pickle in the pickle jar.

He had memorized the entire Qur'an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good silhouettes.

In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister’s absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality.

God had pulled her through a needle's eye so narrow that this thread in front of them was all that remained.

His face was broken in a way Akhmed couldn’t look at, let alone understand, let alone mend.

When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime. Combat

You want to get out?" He said. "Who doesn't?". "I can do well in the West". "Anyone can do well when they aren't dodging bullets.

In all likelihood, Sonja had more academic journal subscriptions than friends. She could explain advanced calculus to her fifth-form algebra teacher but couldn't tell a joke to a boy at lunch.

He is very good at chess,” the girl snapped, and glared at Akhmed. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive, and after amending Akhmed’s statement, she leaned back against the wall and with small, certain breaths, said is is is. Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.

She ate quickly. Hunger was a sensation so long situated in his abdomen he felt it as he would an inflamed organ. He took his time, tonguing the pulp into a little oval and resting it against his cheek like a lozenge. If the bread wouldn't fill his stomach, it might at least fill his mouth. The girl had finished half of hers before he took a second bite. "You shouldn't rush'" he said. "There are no taste buds in your stomach." She paused to consider his reasoning, then took another bite. "There’s no hunger in your tongue," she mumbled between chews. Her cupped hand caught the crumbs and tossed them back in her mouth.

They never said it, Ramzan never thanked him for it, but they both knew that the week he spent treating the infection was just that. If a stranger were to put his ear in the space between them, he would hear the dull roar of that knowledge.

There’s no working radio tower in the country. It’s all static,” she said, without looking to him. “I know. But 102.3 plays the best. Not too tinny. Full and robust. If a cello were to perform static, it would sound like this.” She shook her head and turned the dial. “I prefer 93.9,” she said. She still hadn’t looked at him. “It’s too thin and monotone. There’s no variation. It just sounds like static.” “And that’s why I like it,” she said. “It sounds like static is supposed to sound.

Don’t insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is crustacean on its mother’s side.” “Explain that to me,” she said, shifting in the seat as the car spun in circles. “A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.

By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn’t willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water.

If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy, but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand.

Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha’s favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities.

Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.