The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Quotes

“Every telling of an event is a portrait of the teller and not the event itself.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“History, like fiction, was illusory, if not an outright lie, but we still existed because of it and it existed because of us.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Memory is a gravitational force. It is constantly attracting us to the past, even if we shouldn’t stay there for too long. Those of us who have a memory are able to live in that fragile space between the past and the future. Those of us who have none are already dead.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“But beyond that, she explained, beyond history or the mistakes of men, beyond time, which was a great and clever thief, beyond all of that, at the edge of the universe or maybe at the start and end of the universe, there was a soft murmur, a constant breath of beauty, a truth.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“History books are not a connecting thread between the living and the dead, but they coax us into thinking they are because the dead are already us and we are already them.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“When there are people like that, said Marina, when there are refugees, because that’s what they truly are, refugees not illegals, like everybody in this country obsessed with barbarism says, when there are refugees there are disseminated memories, tendrils of memories like octopus ink, orphaned memories, fragments of memories like pages of a half-burned book. All of those memories are still living.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Briefly, he thought of his mother, or rather, the mother of his childhood, his permanent mother, an island herself, a quiet and perplexing woman adrift in an ocean of wheat, and how she had once told him in a steady and rising Yiddish voice that literature was a memory of a memory of a memory.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Nationalism always works overtime to create its own reality”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“ghosts of the multiverse, trapped in a ghastly and suffocating image continually running on a loop:”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“So much of what we consider free will is subject to fleeting moments transmitted from one person to another like conduction.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“a game that, due to his long absences as a foreign correspondent, served to fill in the innumerable gaps of a memory not shared but rather invented, like connect the dots or Mad Libs, a game that conjured images of fierce adventures, vulnerable distant lands, and a childhood discovered or rediscovered in the constant liquid movement of telling.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“It was as if the teeming, operatic city of his childhood was an invisible city inside yet another invisible city, and so on, back through the decades and even centuries, a great big invisible belly heaving slowly under the near-tropical heavens, as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar might say.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Maxwell said he didn’t know the difference between a great science fiction story or just a good one or even a terrible one. Benjamin said the difference lay in possibility, in the possibility of the story and the possibility of the language in which the story was told.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“So, all we could do was wait in her house, a small, humid, and airy house which had a ghost-like quality about it, not haunted in the supernatural sense, I don’t believe in those things, but memory-haunted, as if its floors and walls and altars and shelves full of figurines and letters of those who had left contained the entire memory of the abandoned village.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Then she paused, finished off her drink, and added that something in the story, something like a sense of departure of the self or maybe an extirpation of the other, in any case, a sense of those who leave and those who stay behind had reminded her of her childhood home, a village on the coast near the city of San Pedro Pochutla.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“The American character, the librarian theorized, was obsessed with movement and tyranny, like a madman, and different from the European character, which was obsessed with systems and order, like a lieutenant, and also very different from the Latin American character, which was obsessed with the abyss of time, Aztec labyrinths, and the Minotaur who wandered both.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“The American character, the librarian theorized, was obsessed with movement and tyranny, like a madman, and different from the European character, which was obsessed with systems and order, like a lieutenant, and also very different from the Latin American character, which was obsessed with the abyss of time, Aztec labyrinths, and the Minotaur who wandered both. The Madman, the Lieutenant, and the Minotaur, the librarian said, constituted the entire history of the New World. In time, by listening to each word and following along with Afraa’s smiling eyes, the Dominicana learned how to read.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“His father was a pirate.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“Nationalism always works overtime to create its own reality.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

“[...] when there are refugees there are disseminated memories, tendrils of memories like octopus ink, orphaned memories, fragments of memories like pages of a half-burned book. All of those memories are still living.”
― Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau