“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Life was an unsteady thing, tottering between little moments of joy and terrible seconds of survival.”
Source: Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife
“I don’t think I realized back then that I wanted to rewrite the past, though, perform a do-over. It’s only in hindsight I’ve come to this conclusion.”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“For my part, I never knew who she’d be on any given day. Now that she’s gone, the mystery remains unsolved, part of my untranslatable life (161).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Once our reasons to be together—our parents, our childhood years—had been removed, not much linkage between us remained (181).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“After all this time, the aches have grown softer but also deeper. They both know the looping shape of pain--it changes and quiets but never ends. There is a strange comfort in its constancy. Memories of what was lost are also reminders of what was held.”
Source: The Light Pirate
“Stories about boys like him only end with us no longer dreaming of time machines, because if one was ever invented in the distant future, it would already have been used to travel back here by someone who loved him”
Source: The Winners