Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Wars break things; they break stories.
We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.
How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?
Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.
War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.
Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.
Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.
I'm wondering when you hit the age where people say, 'Oh, OK, he's not so young.'
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
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.
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors.
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.
She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.
To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.
I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
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.
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.
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?
When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
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.
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.
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.
I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.
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.
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
It's hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved - I don't think I've ever met someone who has encountered 'Calvin and Hobbes' without falling for them.
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.
During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.
We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.
My work often begins as little internal dares, wondering if I can pull something off. So I spent a few years drawing these stories together, trying to build a Pangea of what began as separate continents.
The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.
A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.