Posts tagged everything is illuminated: quotes
It was three years later since the book was released when I watched Everything is Illuminated as the Liev Shcreiber-directed movie featuring Elijah Wood, and that one, to my poor college-junior-addicted-to-pirated-“art-films”-while-taking-an-indie-filmmaking-prod-class taste, was just OK, so I was skeptical when I picked this one up early this year, another failed period given my supposedly firmer resolve to stop buying new books until I finish all the titles in my current stack, but the movie was a bad introduction.
There were pages I could highlight entirely that they would be useless like this, but I’ve stopped doing that to my books because being too self-conscious, which I’m usually are already, I found, sometimes ruins the whole reading experience, yet I couldn’t actually help it, so I ended up folding some dogears when something made me snigger, crushed, twitterpated, smile quietly. Here are some:
“They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious—not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.”
“Jews Have Six Senses
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing…memory… It is only by tracing the pinprick back to the pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain—that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.”
“God is the original plagiarizer… God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.”
“Meet me under the wooden bridge, and I will show you things you have never, ever seen. The “M” was taken from the army that would take his mother’s life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the “eet” from the approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH LESACS; the “me” from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND THE CRIMEA; the “und” from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the “er” from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE…and so on, and so on, each note a collage of love that could never be, and war that could.”
I knew I had more lines loved, but I resisted to mark anything in the first half of the book until I can’t take it anymore—that explosive, glowing-from-outer-space orgy, the use of “shitting bricks,” and so on—thus this, my copy going back on the shelf now, tucked over a compressed queue invisibly marked “read.” The rest, and maybe the next, hopefully Handmaid’s Tale or Tell All, I’m pretty sure they’re just out there tightly wrapped in bookstore shelves, yellowing in Booksale, or stacked on my coffeetable.
And you, how do you arrange your books? ;)
He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
Is God sad?
Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.
(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)
… an angel with gravestone-feathered wings descended from heaven to take Trachim back with him, for Trachim was too good for this world. Of course, who isn’t? We are all too good for each other.
From my reading today…
“…accepting the compromise of the way we have bee, the way we are, and the way we will likely be…may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.”
“I am so young, and he is so aged, and both of these facts should make us people who are deserving of their dreams, but this is not a possibility.” —- Alex
A tattoo from Everything is Illuminated that my friend and I both got. “No unloving words” - from the passage: “This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn’t have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
I find that this quote makes me a bit sad…
“…if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. We often make ourselves appear as though we are foolish people, and we make our voyage, which was an ennobled voyage, appear very normal and second rate. We could give your grandfather two arms, and could make him high-fidelity. We could give Brod what she deserves…We could even find Augustine…and you could thank her, and Grandfather and I could embrace, and it could be perfect and beautiful, and funny, and usefully sad, as you say.”
Also I find it very endearing that Alex always signs his letters “Guilelessly, Alexander.” That suits him so much more than “Sincerely” does.
—-Lauren
But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
so enjoying this book!
this is my favourite quote so far…
“I love you means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you. And also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you. And also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be a family.
