The Boys Quotes

“Signora Fiore makes the cloth people, but they belong to the community. To everyone.”

Izzy was trying to formulate a polite way of asking Signora Fiore why she made the cloth people when the woman supplied the answer. “She says this town is known as a ‘village at the edge.’l Izzy studied Signora Fire’s crosshatched face as she translated her words. “There are many of these villages around Italy. First the young people moved to the cities. They left the elderly -‘the ancients,’ they call them - behind. Then the ancients died.” Signora Fiore was shaking her head as she surveyed the empty square. “Then the pandemic came and even more of the older people died. This village used to have five hundred people. Now there are forty-five.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys

“When people started dying in the village, the emptiness gave her a huge canvas to work with. She has always liked to sew. So last year, she started sewing the cloth people. She’s made more than a hundred of them. They are real people. People who died.”

The bells of the church rang, and a solitary woman in a black shawl left the church and crossed the piazza. Signora Fiore was still talking. “The people who died are ‘gli spariti.’” Izzy stopped, unsure how to translate this. “‘Gli spariti,’ they’re called,” she said. “The vanished.”

“The vanished?” Ethan asked. Izzy nodded. Signora Fiore was still talking. “Some of the cloth people aren’t people who died. Like Signora Fiore’s own children. They live in Milan. Her daughter is a doctor. Her son owns a furniture store. She has sewn them because she doesn’t know when she’ll see them again.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys

“Mike the Cat was already a senior citizen by the time I met him, a reality I had trouble adjusting to. I had never owned a pet, yet from knowing people who did I was aware that we bring animals into our lives in tacit acknowledgment of the heartbreak to come, recognizing that in the normal course of events we will eventually have to watch them grow arthritic and rheumy, then say a final, wrenching goodbye. From the minute I met Mike the Cat, I lived in fear of the day we would find him splayed on the living room rug, seized by respiratory failure or colitis or the final agonizing throes of cat cancer.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys

“With all the Kindles and iPads these days, there’s no more peeking at dust jackets; we’ve lost the ability to assess total strangers according to the books in their hands. How are you supposed to judge a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one?”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys