Boy from the North Country Quotes

“Nothing in my life is how I expected it. If I’ve learned anything”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“I’ve learned what it means to take the pieces of the universe we’re given”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“she went on, “you can change whatever you want about yourself. What is life if not a series of transformations? But your foundation has to be love for who you are now.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Playing the same song the same way is like asking the Torah to mean the same thing to everyone who ever read it. No color there, nothing worthwhile. Got to keep that page open.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Every time you recollect,” he said one night, sitting on the windowsill and looking at me over his guitar, “the memory is different in your head. Every time you read a book it changes because you’ve changed. You have to keep seeking or everything goes flat. All those years I was trying to close the book but I’ve got to keep it open.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Dylan sat on the windowsill and repeated one of the lines of the poem I had read to him, and it occurred to me that this was how he went through life, someone read him a poem or mentioned a song, and if he was intrigued he learned all he could, and that led to something else. He was constantly moving through time, place, language. He was so erudite but hadn’t lasted a year in college. He’d dropped out, was self-taught, needed to understand the world on his own terms. He was relentless in pursuit of anything that could help him get there, whether it was a Leonard Cohen song or the lifework of an Italian poet.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“I’ve wondered if I’m mad to love this tree so deeply. Then I remind myself: The question isn’t How much can you love a tree? The question is How much can you love? How much can you open yourself to the glory of life? The way it’s always changing. Always giving. The way life breaks and mends your heart.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“It always makes me think,” she said, stroking Lucy’s silken ears, “that you can tell the story of any life two ways. You can tell the story of Tevye’s life as one of abandonment, loss, futility. Or you can tell the story of Tevye’s life as one of resilience, strength, hope. I’ve spent so much of my life coming through the first story and into the second.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“I didn’t need to press the matter tonight. This was the first time since her surgery that she was at ease and I didn’t want to take that from her.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“You might even say that time with you is my favorite part of being alive.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Before we begin,' Stella said that first night, 'I want you to know that your insecurity is selfish. Acting is not about you. It is about the relationship between the character and the audience. The actress is a medium, nothing more. It is a great privilege to serve as that medium. You are part of a tradition that has existed for twenty-five hundred years. It will continue to exist whether you are arrogant, insecure, celebrated, or ignored. None of that should concern you. All that should concern you is achieving your character to the greatest possible extent.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country

“What matters in life is whether people are there for you. When you suffer, when you thrive, who is there for you?” She had told me she wanted to live her own life, not be a footnote in Dylan’s. I looked at my reflection and understood that my mother’s refusal to discuss him was one prolonged act of protection, not against the answer but rather the question. Her desire had always been for me to become my own person in my own way.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“I’ve learned what it means to take the pieces of the universe we’re given, even the ones we don’t want, burnish them with love, and return them in better condition than we received them.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Raeben”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“replacing her with him, singing with wounded emotion about the boy from the north country. He sang with his eyes closed and scrunched face taking on each of the ballad’s emotions, like he was part of the song, it was a story he was living inside. He’d become a different person when he entered the song, the way Stella said the best actors entered a character, the way Chagall became Joseph, and as he pleaded another stanza it occurred to me that Bob Dylan himself was a character of his own creation, a work of fiction.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“Ginsberg’s “America,”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“One evening, as we walked across the field at dusk, I asked my mother why we had to wait an entire year for the following book. “Because the author needs time to write the story,” she said. And that is my first memory of understanding that a book is not part of the natural landscape, as are other sources of beauty, such as the mountains or sky, but rather is made by the human hand.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel

“It was not until Oxford that I encountered the image again. It was then I learned the photograph had been taken by an anonymous American soldier at Buchenwald, on April 16, 1945. It is among the most infamous visual portrayals of the Shoah not only because it depicts survivors at their moment of liberation, but also because, in the depths of the photograph, only his bald skull and tormented face visible to the lens, lies Elie Wiesel, whose account of the extermination camps in Night revealed more than any photograph could. Something else drew me to that photograph. On the twenty-three visible faces is the fullest range of human expression I have ever seen in one place: hope, resignation, thrill, humiliation, longing, and defiance.”
― Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country: A Novel