Chris Bohjalian Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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.

Chris Bohjalian
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.

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

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

Chris Bohjalian
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?)...

Chris Bohjalian
Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially—romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

Chris Bohjalian
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.

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

Chris Bohjalian
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.

Chris Bohjalian
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?

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

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

Chris Bohjalian
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.

Chris Bohjalian