Etna Quotes

“During the war, I always felt relief when I crossed paths with a living cat. It was because they appeared in unexpected placed. High up in a tree or on the slope of a roof. Balancing themselves on a fence post. In the arms of a corpse in a ditch. I loved the way the brought me out of the landscape, briefly, into a new place--a new level to see the world we were traversing.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“Yeah, we sort of made a mess of things here, didn't we.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“But I'm not sure what to do now, now that I'm here. I'm not sure what to do. I'm here, and yet nothing familiar has come to me, as though I'm still far away, still moving. Like I haven't yet arrived. Or like I've come here for the first time, smelling and seeing things here for the first time. Everything new and unknown.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“Heading up into the mountains, I wondered if there might come a time when I would lose the memory of that day – the clarity and the stillness of it – and how I would feel about that. How I would feel if one day I stopped carrying certain things in my head, so many of the things I kept returning to in my head…and whether this meant I had managed to go far enough away, into a time when all of this was old. Which would also mean a time when I was old, older.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“I thought about Fuji when she was that young and frightened and about how I had once been that young and frightened, too. I thought about how over the years she was no longer frightened, but that some days she charged and fought like she was trying to get back to time when she was frightened.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“Whats a volcanao? he said.
His ears moved as I explained it as best as I knew. I said it was like a door holding in what was inside the earth. And sometimes that door broke open, and the earth erupted and there was fire.
You mean war? the old dog said. You're named after war?
I stayed quiet. I licked my paw. No one had ever said that about my name before.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“As time went on, the more hurt she was, the more she wanted to hurt.

And the blue in her eyes grew less blue, and I could never explain that.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna

“calm.”
― Paul Yoon, Etna