One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!
~ Reif Larsen
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said, it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.
Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.
A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.
Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.
Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha
A novel is a tricky thing to map.
