As a kid, I remember supposedly authortative adults getting angry with me if I doodled in a book or marked my place by bending the pages. For some reason I did and do feel this gives the book tangible character, besides that of which it already contains in its words. I feel more at home in the book this way. It's a habit that only ever felt natural to me, and I'm glad I never broke my tendencies to 'ruin' a book. This weekend I finished a heart-wrenching book that must have more pages folded than not and more words marked than left blank. Here are some sad and cynical, but also certainly inspiring, quotes from Everything is Illuminated:
"What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?"
"Death is the only thing in life that you absolutely have to be aware of as it's happening."
"Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was."
"A bad person is someone who does not leament his bad actions."
"Life is no fair payment for idiocy."
"I found it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love."
"I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky."
"I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time."
"She told him that she wished there were another commandment, an eleventh etched into the tablets: Do not change."
"To feel alone is to be alone. That's what it is."
"Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed. You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame."
"There is no love. Only the end of love."
"Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love."
"It is not a gift. It is payment for everything you will leave behind."