Highlights

"A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea."

"That’s only three."

"You have to do disappointment twice."

. . .

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use ‘beautiful’ to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now - clear and precise. Humble like dreams.

. . .

As he faces the horizon, we realize that maybe it’s all any of us can hope to do. Survive. Caught in the raging crosscurrents of history, of sorrow, and of certain death, a man realizes he is powerless, that all his belief in himself is vanity…a dream. So he does his best, he squirms against the snow and the wind and his own animal hungers, and this is a life. For family, for love, for simple decency, a good man rages against nature, and the brutality of fate, but it is a war he can never win. Every love is the same love, and it is overpowering - the wrenching grace of what it is to be human. We love. We try. We die alone.

. . .

People can handle an unjust world; it’s when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.

. . .

For him, music had always been a pose, a kid’s pissed-off reaction to aesthetic grace; he’d spent his whole life giving beauty the finger. Now he felt empty, shrill - a failure and an unknown. Nothing.

. . .

Couldn’t love be gentler, smaller, quieter, not quite all-consuming?

. . .

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character - what we believe - none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story!

. . .

But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos - we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren’t measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant - sail for Asia and stumble on America - and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

. . .

Sometimes, what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. The smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.

. . .

How much easier life would be if our intentions and desires could always be aligned.

. . .

He believed he could spot an American anywhere by the quality - that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

. . .

His aunt never made breakfast, even though Carlo had insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. ( It’s a lazy man’s meal, she always said. What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?)

. . .

A man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

. . .

He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite - a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

. . .

But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

. . .

True sacrifice is painless.

. . .

What business does memory have with time?