“She’ll try to divide us, Jason. That’s what she does.”
Source: Mother
“She’s crazy, Jason. You don’t understand. There’s a reason I never talk about my mother.”
Source: Mother
“My grandmother’s hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
“I came to realize that my grandmother’s stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind’s honeycomb.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
“Cómo está Marta, preguntará él, Cansada, pero bien, responderé yo, y estas palabras también las andamos diciendo constantemente, no me extrañaría nada que cuando transitemos de este mundo hacia el otro todavía consigamos encontrar fuerzas para responder a alguien que se le ocurra la imbécil idea de preguntarnos cómo nos sentimos, Muriendo, pero bien, es lo que diremos.”
“I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
“I realized that she was my beloved witness, and I the receiver of her story. When I was a boy, she had showered me with love; now as a man, I could return that love.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
“A strange feeling spreads through Avery’s chest, a slow, honeyed warmth he can’t ignore. It seeps over the fear, the sorrow, the bitter wretched dread that has always lived inside him, and it clings like a stain against his ribcage.
This feeling that is somehow terrible and holy and beautiful all at once.
He is not alone.”
Source: The Kings of Nowhere
“I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
“Had I been a witness to a memory of hers so terrible that it could only be said to me, an eleven-year-old, half delirious with fever, lying in bed between darkness and light? My grandmother had spoken so emphatically that day, in clipped, deliberate speech, as if to say, 'This is a moment to listen.”
Source: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past