Siobhan Fallon > Siobhan's Quotes

“Be safe, she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and said in a low, broken monotone, "I love you.

Kailani



Siobhan Fallon”
― Siobhan Fallon

“After a dazed moment, Specialist Kit Murphy put his arms loosely around her, and Josie Schaeffer clung to him, knowing this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go.”
― Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone

“I said I don't want to know," Kailani said firmly, her voice suddenly too loud. Cristina sat back into the bench, her eyes wide and disappointed. Then Ana started waving wildly, her small hand arcing for her mother's undivided attention, and, as Kailani watched in silence, the child slipped safely down the slide."

Kailani to Cristina”
― Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone

“There was so much he could have said and chose not to. “I didn’t pry into your past, Margaret. I don’t pry into your life before we met, so don’t do it to me.”
And that was it, there was nothing more to say. I nodded my head and ever since I’ve made myself comfortable in this limbo of not knowing. Sleepless in this bed I made.”
― Siobhan Fallon, The Confusion of Languages

“Those who have lived abroad know exactly what I mean. Our status as Americans creates an instantaneous, rarified friendship. You are in a fast food restaurant where they have odd things on the menu, makluba, zaatar, soojouk, and you are scrambling for something you recognize, pizza, or even pita, and then you hear that perfect Hello or How you doing? You gravitate toward that table of strangers, desperate, dear God, speak to me, fellow outsiders in in appropriate revealing clothing, seak to me American sweet nothings of sports and reality T.V. It’s the same anywhere. You reach for the known in an unknown place. You become friends with someone you wouldn’t be able to stand if you actually had options. Our history of Super Bowl commercials and expectations of flushable toilet paper seal us together.”
― Siobhan Fallon, The Confusion of Languages

“We depend on this give-and-take when living abroad. You can’t exile yourself from your homeland and not always feel that tidal pull of return. Those minor details, the commercial jingles and pop songs, the chain restaurants and decade-defining shades of our blue jeans, are details you don’t even think about until you are face-to-face with a society that has very little to do with your own. Suddenly those one-hit wonders become a secret language, the very vestige of American culture.”
― Siobhan Fallon, The Confusion of Languages

“Sure, people stare… I think it’s curiosity. Most of the time if I give a big smile, the person looks totally shocked to have been caught and will smile back. They go from a sort of blankness to this welling gladness. Women especially blossom into joy and will give really lovely, open smiles in return, with a ilhamdallah or masha’allah and a pat on the head or a pinched cheek for Mather, maybe a few words for me, Welcome to Jordan! They’re so surprised and grateful I’m smiling at them! Even women who are fully covered, just a tiny window for their eyes peeking from a veil. You can see the uplift in the corners of their eyelids, feel their genuine warmth”
― Siobhan Fallon, The Confusion of Languages

“The FRG … was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phones with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the Army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again.”
― Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life”
― George A. Custer, My Life on the Plains General George A. Custer

“I would rather have a good education and no money, than to have a fortune and be ignorant.”
― George Armstrong Custer

“No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.”
― Thomas Hardy