Chris Bohjalian Quotes

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

Dead … might not be quiet at all.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn't a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?).

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.