more quotes (now w/pt. 2)

Here are a few more quotes I picked up on. Mike's covered it pretty thoroughly (particularly crucial is the translation segment in 108-9), but here are a few more that can be added to our library.

(absence of sound vs. absence of sight)
pg 11: 'I can't hear. This is more frightening to me than darkness, and when I can't stand the silence any longer, I slip out of my wet skin, into sound.'

(existence in/separation from history)
pg 17: 'I did not witness the most important events of my life'

(transmitted histories)
pg. 20: 'Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history'

(same)
pg 28: 'Athos's stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence'

(egocentricity and other selves)
pg 60: 'His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far'

(atrocities exploited)
pg 70: 'Send the tourists to the burnt-out chorios. These are our historic sites now. Let the tourists visit modern ruins'

(language as constructive and destructive)
pg 78: 'A single letter was a matter of life and death'

pg 79: 'I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me'

(humanity's active ability to shape history - not deterministic)
pg 84: 'There was luck in the islanders sailing to the mainland for safety, but first they had to heed the signs... There was luck in our meeting, Jakob, but first you had to run.'

(geological identity)
pg 86: "What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides"

(language)
pg 101: 'And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

(interpersonal absence)
pg 115: "When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone"

(research)
pg 120: 'In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy.'

(murder as denying access to the future)
pg 120:"Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his own life."

this is interelated to a quote from earlier on:

pg 24: 'The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied'

(theoretical vs. the practical - tied into the feminist fiction/theory concept? marlatt vs. michaels - male protagonists)
pg 132: 'How could I discuss their upper-class communism with them, those who shone with certainty and had never had the misfortune of witnessing theory refuted by fact?'

(interpretation)
pg 136: 'One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it'

(history and memory existing as one)
pg 140: 'Every moment is two moments'

(the inevitability of the fictional in biography)
pg 141: 'Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man's life are invisible. Unknown to others as our dreams. And nothing releases the dreamer; not death in the dream, not waking.'

(construction of self through memory)
pg 144: 'But each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it.'

(history shaping ideology)
pg 160: 'History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know.'

(ephemeral nature of memory)
pg 170: 'I long for memory to be spirit, but I fear it is only skin.'

(the tangible, touchable nature of her skin operating in the present allows the past, his memories, to be silenced momentarily... Michaela's ability to shape the present separates her from the dead)
pg 180: 'Instead of the dead inhaling my breath with their closeness, I am deafened by the buzzing drone of Michaela's body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin'

and
pg 181: 'But there is no tinge of death in Michaela's skin'

(violent separation from past - affirmation of the corporeal)
188: 'This is where I become irrevocably unmoored... suspended in the present'
189: 'Now, inside Michaela yet watching her, death for the first time makes me believe in the body'

(scent, microhistories, piecing together a day)
191: 'I search Michaela for fugitive scents... I trace her day'

................
II.

(silence, physical/emotional divide)
204: 'We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness'

(post-holocaust relief, affirmation of life/faith)
205: 'Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility - both the inorganic and the organic - shoes and socks, their own flesh'

(power of language - tie in to graffiti pt.I)
207: 'Who knew that even one letter - like the "J" stamped on a passport - could have the power of life or death'

(memory - physical, shared history)
211: 'A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled'

(holocaust photographs/bog people - leading up to this moment... The historical unknowns preserved in fragments)
221: 'I can see now that my fascination wasn't archeology or even forensics: it was biography. The faces that stared out at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother's face when she fell asleep on the couch, were the faces of people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be'

(approaches to history)
222: 'The quest to discover another's psyche, to absorb another's motives as deeply as your own, is a lover's quest. But the search for facts... all this amounts to nothing if you can't find the assumption your subject lives by'

233: 'But I was born into absence. History had left a space already fetid with undergrowth...'

242: 'She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you the most'

(traces of past existence)
265: '...in the knit of atoms, their touch is left behind. Every room emanated absence yet was drenched with your presence'

(true meaning, true identity - unification of body and soul... bit of a nod to the ideas of In the Skin of Lion here)
267: 'Your poems from those few years with Michaela, poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future. Your words and your life no longer separate, after decades of hiding in your skin'

(shaking the past from the present)
278: 'I shook myself free of a million lives, an unborn for every ghost, over Petra's firm belly and brown thighs...'

(reshaping history: fictional/imaginational)
279: 'They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man's memories then another's, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine...'

(body vs. memory...)
285: '...I can't tell you what her wrists look like, or the knot of bone of her ankle... I know what she makes of her memories. I know what she remembers. I know her memories.'