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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The tour concluded with our buying the ingredients for shabu-shabu to enjoy that night with Tomiko and her husband. Sitting around the wooden table in Tomiko's kitchen, we drank frosty Kirin beers and munched on edamame, fresh steamed soybeans, nutty and sweet, that we pulled from their salt-flecked pods with our teeth. Then Tomiko set down a platter resplendent with gossamer slices of raw beef, shiitake mushrooms, cauliflower florets, and loamy-tasting chrysanthemum leaves to dip with long forks into a wide ceramic bowl of bubbling primary dashi. I speared a piece of sirloin. "Wave the beef through the broth," instructed Tomiko, "then listen." Everyone fell silent. As the hot dashi bubbled around the ribbon of meat, it really did sound as though it was whispering "shabu-shabu," hence the onomatopoeic name of the dish. I dipped the beef in a sauce of toasted ground sesame and soy and as I chewed, the rich roasted cream mingled with the salty meat juices. "Try this one," urged Tomiko, passing another sauce of soy and sesame oil sharpened with lemony yuzu, grated radish, and hot pepper flakes. I tested it on a puffy cube of warm tofu that Tomiko had retrieved from the dashi with a tiny golden wire basket. The pungent sauce invigorated the custardy bean curd.”

“The touring makes you take a step back. It makes you realize how your lifestyle has changed. You spend all this time inside, alone, writing. And then it becomes about travel and new places and new people. And I do love talking to people about the book, but ideally, I like a little less disruptive lifestyle, I like it when things are more organized.”

“The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.”

“The Tourist Office would put it back up again before somebody noticed and didn’t come to Deanna for a holiday on the white sandy beaches, where they could watch little marsupial Braking Dolphins swimming backwards through the tour boats’ propeller in the strong current, or to blow up Cocka Snoek in the Whatoosie River with a little help from the Skeggs Valley Dynamite Fishing Club.”

“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.”

“The Tower of Babel is one of those mythological narratives that, in the words of the 4th-century philosopher Sallustius, 'never happened, but always are.' Man in his arrogance always strives against his own nature and circumstances to bring together the different nations of the world and establish an order that can facilitate some lofty ideal and he always fails. Just as Nimrod’s tower fell, so did Alexander’s, Cyrus’s, Attila’s, and Napoleon’s. This sort of geopolitical project—even when buttressed by the best reasons and most noble goals—never succeeds.”

“The tower of cookies was high enough to touch the lanterns Mrs. Belmagio and Mrs. Vaci brought in a five-tiered chocolate cake, meticulously decorated with plump crimson cherries and hazelnut frosting. Each layer was shaped like a scalloped bowl, meant to resemble the fountain in Pariva's central square, and topped with a generous sprinkling of bluebell petals. But what made Chiara tear up were the cards pressed carefully into the cake, each on a sliced piece of cork---messages from every friend, neighbor, child, and elder she had ever known. We'll miss you. May you spread your light and make all of Esperia bright.”

“The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names. The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!”

“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now & with somebody & and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”

“The Town and Country Market was just a half mile from Bee's home. I used to walk there as a girl, with my sister or my cousins, or sometimes all by myself, picking purple clover flowers along the way until I had a big round bunch, which, when pressed up to your nose, smelled exactly of honey. Before the walk, we'd always beg the adults for twenty-five cents and return with pockets full of pink Bazooka bubble gum. If summer had a flavor, it was pink bubble gum.”

“The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.”

“The town had an idyllic quietude, a fishing village that decided that was the best way to stay for a century. The houses were wooden, the exteriors faded to a uniform gray by the salt air. They were not, however, the least bit drab. Bright plants prospered, ivies snaking over the shingles so that the houses seemed less built as grown. The sole exception to this canopy was the church. Set at the foot of a mountain, its door was a staggering red, the stained-glass of the steeple pulsing decadently. When the sun hit it, I could believe the town had fallen under a spell that tithed its color to the church. When Sunday night mass began, this window poured forth a kaleidoscopic radiance rivaling saintly visions.”

“the town had been the arrival port for thousands of Yoeme people, deported from Sonora in the first years of the twentieth century, under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. People who had been forcibly removed from their homes and villages because of their resistance to the opening of their ancestral land — the largest, most fertile river valley in Mexico — to make way for Mexican and American venture capitalists.”

“The Town Hall Pub on a Wednesday night was just regulars anyway, so we could play whatever. Worst case scenario, it would be the same seven people who were always at the bar getting drunk, and they would be there for us. But we just told our friends and family, and they came out to support us. Then they told their friends, who told their friends, who told their friends. It was a full-on event.”