David > David's Quotes

“It's not like in a story. In stories, the endings are ones we can handle, even if they aren't so happy, because they let you linger, they let you go on, sustaining you with morsels of wonder and hope.”
― Chang rae-Lee

“Yet the way he spoke sounded as natural and sure, so tender and brotherly, and even as I figured it was some sort of con, I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn't yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.”
― Chang rae-Lee, My Year Abroad

“It's not like in a story. In stories, the endings are ones we can handle, even if they aren't so happy, because they let you linger, they let you go on, sustaining you with morsels of wonder and hope.”
― Chang-rae Lee, My Year Abroad

“Religion is a carnivorous fish in the abyssal depths. It emits the feeblest of light and needs a vast darkness around it to attract its prey.”
― Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly

“I suppose though," Matteo offered, "most of us in New York live double lives, with a secret of some sort living behind closed doors."
"Really? What's your secret?"
"I already told you. I'm a hoarder."
She giggled.
"So, what's your secret?" Matteo asked.
"I'm a terrible person.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“And so, Olga, you must see yourself and my absence not as one little girl missing her mother, but as a brave young woman who knows that in a world of oppression, achieving liberation will require sacrifice. You can't stay in your room and cry. You can't keep Abuelita up at night with your tears. You have to keep your head held high, you have to be strong. Like the revolutionary we raised you to be.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“She was, in that environment, to those college boys, like a hanger, or a price tag, or the machine that swiped the black American Express cards. Not an object to be desired, but a tool to facilitate the acquisition of desirable things.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white—rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead of another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it's not like we have bad intentions, si? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“Again and again, Olga returned to church after that, hopeful that this visit would be the moment when she was healed. That on this occasion, the anger that so often filled her would be replaced by grace.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“Yeah, my dad picked [ the name Olga]. Wanted to make me 'ambitious.' But my mother worried that I would take after the Olga from Puerto Rican Obituary. That Olga was ashamed of her identity and died dreaming of money and being anything other than herself.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“I knew no one would understand," [Blanca] said, "But to be honest, no one's ever really understood. My whole life I felt my skin was too small for what I knew was possible for me. I spent years fighting my way off of this narrow path laid out for me—as a woman, as a Boricua. And yet, despite all my efforts, there I was. In exactly the life I'd been so desperate to avoid. I felt I was choking in Brooklyn, choking trying to compress myself into that life. I knew what everyone would think. What kind of woman leaves her family? But to me, what I did was an act of love. For what I believed I could do here, in Puerto Rico, but also for myself.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“[Reggie]," Prieto continued, "I've got to ask, what are you doing here? You have so much going on. Legit shit. Have you really thought this through? What happens on the day revolution actually comes? Because my mom is out for blood and I'm not sure you're that kind of dude. Not really. You just play him of TV. You're hitching your wagon to my mother, and my mother does not give a f***k about you or all you stand to lose.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming

“There has to be a way to make better sense of the phenomenon: one that doesn't rely on ready-made positions rooted in unquestioning belief or disbelief; one that moves past the pop-culture veneer and rhetoric of opposing camps and into the more nuanced territory where psychology, culture, history, literature, and indigenous experience overlap.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“I go over the arguments for and against the creature's existence in an attempt to ground myself. In doing so, I'm reminded of how intractable the debate is. On one side you have the disciples of the rational notion that anything that can't be shown to exist physically cannot exist. On the other is the view that when something can't be seen, or can't be shown to exist, this doesn't prove it's not there.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“What sets [some stories] apart from other Sasquatch tales is the drama, danger and emotional tension built into them—and a narrative flamboyance that fire the imagination. Raising the emotional pitch, research shows, lead to gullibility and conditioning.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“How far-fetched (or not) we deem the Sasquatch might also hinge on our perception of space. Bigfoots may be unbelievable to so many people simply because most of us are disconnected from the true depths and expanses of the earth and its wild areas.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“If you see a Sasquatch out on the land, it's meant to tell you something. You were supposed to see it. You don't go looking for it just for the sake of seeing it. If you do, you'll never find them... it's just like in life; when you try too hard to find something, you can't. But then as soon as you stop looking, stop trying, you become more likely to find it.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“Contrary to what we think, we experience reality not as it actually is—but as a simplified model. The reason for this? Reality is far too complex. Infinitely complex, in fact... as a result, our mind evolved to construct a deeply simplified version of all that surrounds us: a virtual reality made up of only the important information—perhaps a trillionth of the possible external stimuli. And we make do with that.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“When people who see a Bigfoot in a transcendental way then choose to search for the creature afterward, they are really looking to relive, or recapture, a moment of expanded awareness that has long since vanished.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“Then a thought hits me: maybe the Sasquatch hasn't been found, indeed can't be found, because it residesin the place most difficult for us to find and navigate. A wilderness of an altogether different sort. A place where people seldom look, or are loath to look: in the subtler shades, the gradations between black and white—the middle ground between "this" and "that," between "It exists" and "It doesn't exist," where the components of truth most often reside.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“It may or may not be real. It doesn't matter if it is literally not.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“The Sasqualogist... is no different from other self-styled heroes. HIs or her particular brand of journeying rests heavily on literal adventuring—questing—through a physically wild landscape... But this quest, it seems to me, is also metaphorical. He or she is in pursuit of what may be the most elusive prize that ever existed—a modern-day holy grail.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things whether the Sasquatch actually exists or not.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“We have an innate, fundamental need for meaning—for our lives to be meaningful.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

“I've learned to see the Sasquatch as a powerful symbol of the natural world—a diminishing realm fro which most of us are becoming increasingly estranged. On one level, Sasquatches personify the more refined spectra of nature that we cannot, or often do not, see. They remind us that there is much more to the natural world, writ large, than meets the eye. They also show us, almost by holding a mirror to ourselves, that they eye with which we see is limited. The artificial lines we humans have created, the fragmentation we have wrought upon the whole, separate us from the wilds to which we are inextricably linked.”
― John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch