More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What consolation this morning ritual here, the warm bread, this sunny yolk, the gurgling samovar, the souvenir saltshaker from a long-ago voyage. Everything in its place, the furnishings just as they were when she left, the front hall already filling with odors of onions browning for stew.
Everyone knows the rules. Never yield the right of way. Never stay in your own lane. Never slow down at a yellow light. If you missed your exit, simply put your car in reverse. You may change the direction of a one-way street. Blow your horn angrily and with abandon.
On driving
He wanted to live his life, what little was left of it, and face death in the privacy of his home.
It was beyond him to understand how grief can fill you so with the feeling of your own flaws and frailty.
Ah, but revolutions have a way of disappointing us and with each slain body, each dreadful disappearance, mistrust bloomed into profound betrayal.
Chores became lifeboats in the storm that lapped at the edges of their lives and threatened to drown them.
She had imagined Americans as being insular but instead found them to be restless dreamers, earnest and intent on shaping and changing an imperfect world,
He’d never heard her laugh and really it sounded exactly like the gurgling stream within earshot of the house where he grew up, an arrangement of water and pebbles that had accompanied his youth.
First love
Where did Lily learn this baking and serving? thought Noor. And here their thoughts converged because Ferry’s mother was equally baffled by the easy comfort and absence of anguish in the girls. It seemed they had jumped the glass walls of the fish bowl to roam the room, while their mothers circled inside.
I want to show you that our lives have meaning beyond the everyday things we dwell on. We play a part, however small, in the times in which we live—we are not here just for ourselves. You
