Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr

 I fell in love with Anthony Doerr's plot, prose & poise after reading "All the lights we cannot see" & his short story collection "Memory wall".

It's no surprise that Cloud cuckoo land fills you with the same warmth as his previous works.

This book comprises stories of Zeno, Seymour, Anna, Omeir and Konstance spread across centuries. From the time of early civilization, to the extreme future, when we humans would have probably destroyed earth's climate enough, to opt for a space craft and continue traveling to an unknown place for survival.

And how does the multiple random stories converge & make sense? Well, through another fable "cloud cuckoo land", excavated from the heavily destroyed manuscripts found buried in the graves of ancient times. This story of Atheon, the birdbrain, nincompoop, and his astonishing journey to the edge of the earth and beyond to find utopia, excels in describing human nature, and their need to find happiness and comfort. Along with their wit and vigor for hope and resilience. It binds the multiple plots, and bring the characters of different timelines together, revealing their beautiful and heart warming story of struggle and survival.

The size of the book may feel like a burden to some but I promise, it is worth your while. After few dragging chapters, and a little confusion about making sense of the multiple characters, the plot moves like fluid. Addictive and fun. Happy reading! 

Kafka On The Shore - Haruki Murakami

A weird, intense, surreal, bewitching world that makes you turn the pages and forces you to decipher the meaning in vain. But still, you feel carried away in a dream like state inside the world of Murakami and feel good at the end for some unknown mysterious reasons.

Two stories interweave.

A boy runs away from his home, at the age of 15, to avoid his father's Oedipal prophecy. He changes his identity to Kafka Tamura; communicates with a boy named crow in times too many; and is determined to find his mother and sister, who left him when he was a child. On the way, he meets Sakura. In his childish fantasies, he considers her to be his lost sister. After many adventures and struggles in the city of Takamatsu, he finds home away from home in Komura Memorial Library. He befriends Oshima (cross gender librarian of that private library with unique music affinity), who helps him in many snafu. He gets attracted to the beautiful but austere Miss Saeki, the head of the library. He imagines that she visits his room at night as a ghost of her 15 year old self. He also spends time in Oshima's cabin far away from the city and explores the forest by himself and finds a surreal world - where he meets the lost, but unaged war veterans and the 15 year old Miss Saeki. Later she cajoles him to return to the real world before it's too late.

An old man, Satoru Nakata lose his memories and intelligence in a suspicious freak accident during World war II. He cannot read but strangly enough can communicate with cats. He lives a simple lonely life in Nogata and earns a bit of extra money by finding missing cats of his neighbours. But his life is changed when he meets Johnnie Walker/ Kafka's father (?) during his hunt of a missing feline, Goma. In this strange world, Johnnie is a peculiar fellow, who kills cat to collect their soul and convert it into a giant flute. He coaxes Nakata to kill him, if Nakata wants to save Goma. Nakata in his utter confusion kills him and surrenders himself to the police. No one believes him, so instead he follows his instinct and decides to leave Tokyo and hitchhike westwards. In his journey he meets Hoshino,a truckdriver, who at first helps Nakata because he reminds Hoshino of his grandfather but slowly he becomes impressed with Nakata and his simplicity and sticks by him to the very end.

The two major characters never meet. But the story is intertwined in an eerie way. They meet in Kafka's blackouts - Kafka wakes up, lost in the city with bloody T-shirt miles away from his father's murder where as Nakata wakes up fresh with the missing felines and clean clothing; in a metaphorical way. The raining fishes and leeches; musical references; repeated diving to surreal world of dreams and ghosts makes the book an unstoppable read.

There is no closure in this book. As my first read 'After Dark', Kafka on the shore ends with too many bubbling questions and a yearning to know more. 

• How did Nakata lost his intelligence? (The strange U.F.O incident during World war II is left unexplained)
• Is Sakura really his sister?
• The strange characters Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders dissaparate as if by magic; no explanations on those characters.
• The entrance stone to the strange world, the illuminated pale object struggling to enter the world is not explained. Was that pale object his father's soul who was trying to flee to the surreal world with his flute making skills but stopped by the crow boy in the dream world and Hoshino in the real world?
• Was Miss Saeki his mother? And how come they have got his portrait in the library wall? 
• What was the connection between Nakata and Miss Saeki?

Kafka's world is a strange one with little logic or practicality. And although you are brimmed with questions, you yield to Murakami's resolution of not explaining every little thing in his creation.

You will either love this book or hate it. But in my case I turned out to be a big fan. So indulged in Kafka's world that it is going to take some time for me to start up another Murakami. I want to savour this to a very long time. This book has also opened my way to a different genre of music. Although I am more of a rock music and an occasional listener of Beethoven and Mozart kind, now I am addicted to Schubert's D major piano performances specially Allegro moderato.

Listen it here! https://youtu.be/YlUj9J4Bjz8

My favorite quotes:

• I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don't care if everybody else forgets.
• Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy- according to Aristotle- comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist weak points but from his good qualities. do you know what i am getting at? People are drawn into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
• There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
• "When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. No body cares whether you like killing other people or not. It's just something you have to do. Otherwise you're the one who gets killed." Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata's chest. "Bang!" he said. "Human history in a nutshell."
• Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.
• Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive.
• Chance encounters are what keeps us going.
• It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.
• When I open them most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers, breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
• Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
• Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.
• If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
• Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
• Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.
• Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
• Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.
• A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Happy reading.

I Am The Messenger - Markus Zusak

The biggest fear about reading another book by your recently discovered favorite writer is whether or not the creation will be able to uphold your expectations. So even after buying the book, I was skeptical about starting the book; fearing the worst. Thankfully my fears were poorly founded. 

I am the messenger is a work of art. Not as amazing as The Book Thief (I should really stop comparing books by the same writer; I mean you can't compare a rose and an orchid. They are beautiful in their own unique ways.), but brilliant indeed. Markus Zusak is the "master of the words" and he knows how to trigger the heart strings by them to create magic.

A nineteen year old cab driver Ed Kennedy is not some protagonist you will swoon over. But a simple man ragged with flaws. He lives in a house with his foul smelling dog, Doorman. At times he meet his friends Marv, Ritchie and Audrey for a game of cards or two (in which he is terrible). He loves his best friend, but she is too afraid to lose him as a friend to love him back. His mom complains about him all the time. He is not close with his brother. He is unsure about his destiny; just taking one moment at a time. "I did it because you are the epitome of ordinariness."

But by chance he foils a bank robbery with his friends and shots to temporary fame in his home town. After that incident, he starts receiving Aces of cards riddled with cryptic messages.

At first, he ignores considering it to be a joke. But curiosity takes the best of him and he starts to follow the messages trying to understand the meaning. Slowly he realizes these messages means he has to be part of someone else life and help them get through their big and small problems; he simply needs to care about their lives. He fulfills the task diligently and in the process grows emotionally. 

In the end he realizes he is not the messenger but a message himself. "I'm not the messenger at all. I'm the message." And how a simple act of kindness reflects back to the doer. And how doing things for others means doing things for yourself.

The end is a little stumbling for me but the beautifully woven words make up for that.
A simple morale woven with words so deep that penetrates your heart.
A must read not just for teenagers as suggested but for everyone. I bet you won't stop laughing at the humorous expression every now and then.

HAPPY READING

Quotes

• Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.
• It's not a big thing, but I guess it's true - big things are often just small things that are noticed.
• Believe it or not - it takes a lot of love to hate you like this.
• I'm not the messenger at all. I'm the message.
• You can kill a man with those words. No guns. No bullets.
• I didn't know words could be so heavy.
• Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.
• Of course you're real - like any thought or any story. It's real when you are in it.
• I realize that nothing belongs to her anymore and she belongs to everything.
• No, I am not a saint, Sophie. I'm just another stupid human.
• Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends? It's just an observation.
• Things just keep going as long as memory can wield its ax, always finding a soft part in your mind to cut through and enter.
• The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like i'm falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.
• May be one morning I'll wake up and step outside of myself to look back at the old me lying among the sheets.
• It's impeccable how brutal the truth can be at times. You can only admire it.
• I did it because you are the epitome of ordinariness.

The Partner- John Grisham

Though I have not reviewed any Grishams in my blog ( My heart and the diary has a different tale to tell ;) ), the partner is not my first book by the writer and definitely not going to be my last.

A captivating read. The story moves like fluid with mysterious twist and turns, revealing the secrets in its own pace and leaving the readers yearning for more.

Patrick S Lanigan- alias Danilo Silva - a junior partner in a firm in Mississippi in his past, is kidnapped in Ponta Pora, Brazil.

He is supposed to be dead (A victim of car accident four years back, leaving his beautiful wife and daughter alone). Six weeks after his death, $90 million disappears from offshore accounts of his firm. His partners become rattled and slowly the story unfolds- the chase begins.

Lanigan realizes his partners were going to cut him out from his share of profit from the firm, which is involved in defrauding the government through overcharging schemes in a ship building contract. Fed up of his life with a cheating wife, a daughter who wasn't his and double tongued partners in his firm he brilliantly devises a plan and waits to collect evidences. He feigns his own death. After the funeral, he goes into hiding with all the money. As time unfurls, he becomes close with Eva Miranda, an associate in a firm in Rio. Later, she ends up being romantically involved with him and also becomes his partner in crime. 

After his arrest, the trial begins and weirdly enough he is able to manipulate every evidences and circumstances in his favor, but does he succeed? 

Go read the book!

The book has got a perfect amalgam of the law thriller. Government; senator; feigning own death; embezzlement; law suits; theft and ways covered brilliantly using the loopholes of the law.

Immediately after completing the book, I was flabbergasted and my first reaction was - "someone tell me this book has a sequel. It can't end this way. Eva cannot just vanish. She is too good a character to do such a lowly thing. Totally chafed by the ending." But as I re-evaluated the end deeply, I was satisfied with the twist of fate. 

I think Eva stood up for herself at last. She was fed up of being a puppet and pawn of someone else's desire. She wanted to live life on her own terms. At least she had a huge heart to get Patrick off the hook and set him free. I still feel bad for Patrick though. So much brilliance; clockwork like mind; baffling plans; so much physical and emotional assault but ended up all alone, penniless. 

But again, if every sleazy man like the protagonist (yes! sleazy because what the firm did was wrong but his method of revenge was not holy either.), his partners, the senator gets his way unscathed; I would have to start questioning karma. 

Brilliant brilliant work.

A must read by Grisham.

Change Of Heart - Jodi Picoult

I came across this book in an exhibition and since I was going berserk, splurging my wallet out; I ended up buying it along with Murakamis, Browns, Grishams and a hell lot more. (Not complaining though cause this is more satisfying than running to shops trying outfits endlessly and not finding a single one to soothe your soul). 

Anyways back to the topic. The story is nice. But I have read better stories by Picoult. The mentioned religion, gospels were balderdash for me though it plays a central role in the plot (I am not an atheist; but rather a spiritualist as one character mentions it once. And as the book suggests - you follow the religion that your parents follow so I literally have very little knowledge related to things being brought to light in this book again and again). But I believe this book was not about religion and creating boundaries but rather about finding yourself in your beliefs and breaking the barrier of stereotypes. So all is well.

Isaiah Matthew Bourne AKA Shay Bourne, who had a juvie record, is caught red-handed killing Police officer Kurt Nealon and his step daughter Elizabeth Nealon. June Nealon (wife of Kurt) who lost her first husband in an accident is heavily pregnant and devastated. The trials go on And Shay is convicted of two counts capital murder. After much heated discussion, the jury finally decides on death penalty. Michael Wright becomes the last juror to agree. 

After 11 years Bourne is transferred to I-tier at the Concord state prison. Many 'hard to explain with logic' things happen around shay and his fellow mates believes it to be a miracle and him to be a messiah. Shay confesses to one of his fellow prisoner about his desire to donate his heart to a little girl after his death to make amends. The girl is non other than Claire Nealon, June's daughter, who is in desperate need of a heart transplant. He turns out to be a perfect match but his lawyer, Maggie Bloom, has a mountain to climb. She needs to go against all the odds with the jury to suspend the death penalty by lethal injection but opt for hanging so that Shay's heart will be viable for donation.

Michael Wright who is now father Michael from St Catherine becomes Shay's legal adviser because his conscience didn't support killing someone as a capital punishment. He opts for helping Shay out to donate his heart, so both of them can find redemption. He falls for Shay's recurrent quotation from Gnostic gospels and considers it as his religious foundation to defend his organ donation desire in the court.

June is in moral dilemma. She is caught between the devil and the sea. To see her only alive daughter die or take the heart of a criminal who killed her husband and daughter. 

But as always there is a twist in the story that makes you think how can someone be so selfless? Is what you see and what you believe - different things? How do you let go? How do you forgive?

Not a bad plot but I have read better books by Picoult. Not a bad read either but the description part made me halt the book  several times and make a fresh start. If you are too aware of your religion and don't want to mess the morals with your brains just avoid it. But if you do, please keep an open mind. Or just read the storyteller, nineteen minutes or My sister's keeper by the same writer instead.

 Quotes

• I don't belong to religion. Religion's the reason the world's falling apart- Did you see that guy carted out of here? That's what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It's a petridish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion's not about being holy. Just holier-than-thou.
• If you wrong forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
• Did you ever notice how sometimes it's mirror, and sometimes it's glass? There's light inside a man of light. It can light up the whole world.
• Words are like nets- we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief or wonder.
• I think finding god is like seeing a ghost - you can be skeptic until you come face-to-face with what you said doesn't exist.
• Family's not a thing, it's a place where all the memories get kept.

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

I have heard a lot about Murakami in recent times; and all were praises about his poetic writing style, thought evoking plots, and his unique approach to deal with stories. I was looking forward  to devour his creations and After dark became my first novel by the proclaimed writer. 

I was perplexed by the plot but amazed by the writing gusto. I have never read a book that could make description so glamorous and mesmerizing.

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

This is a story of just one special and supernatural night in Tokyo before people move back to their daily rise and grind of everyday life. 

Mari is trying to spend a night away from home; away from her sister Eri, who is nestled in a deep sleep for months without any organic cause (intriguing plot). Having her coffee and reading a book (the title is never mentioned) in a restaurant, she meets Takahashi (Friend of Eri).  Takahashi tries to communicate but Mari builds an invisible wall around herself and divulge very little about her purpose of hanging out so late at night alone. Later after Takahashi leaves; a stranger, Kaoru, comes to Mari and asks for her help. A Chinese girl is beaten up ruthlessly in Alphaville and she needs Mari's help to understand the language. Mari helps. She explores the unknown world after dark. 

In the meantime, Eri is in deep sleep and we can see that she is stalked by a faceless masked man; she is trapped in a nightmare and couldn't get out of her mind cage. 

Mari meets several people that night, whom she would have never come across otherwise. It forces her to re evaluate her relationship with her sister. She meets Takahashi again and it may be a beginning of a good long lasting friendship. Every character seems to intertwine in the story somehow, although their real day-light world is extremely different. The story ends with Mari getting back home and sleeping aside Eri.

The story feels incomplete; the strings untied; no closure. You will be searching for logic to all the surreal incidents. Why Eri is trapped in her dreams? Will she ever wake up? What's the fate of the man who beat that Chinese girl? Who was the masked man? Why the after images get stuck in the mirror (It's spooky!)? Will Mari and Takahashi ever meet again? So the book ends with too many 'Wh-' questions. But the writing prose is mesmerizing. May I borrow the word 'poetic'. 

The story moves with a grace of a movie scene. We feel like helpless audience. Or let's say its like reading a screenplay of a movie.

A deep read though the pages are less and the story seems hanging over the cliff without the revelation of any logic. You need to devour the pages.. the paragraphs... the sentences... even words; slowly and calmly to enjoy the fascinating and mysterious night world. Looking forward to more of Mr Murakami's magical works.

• I can't understand nothingness. I can't understand it and can't imagine it.
• Time move in its own special way in the middle of the night. You can't fight it.
• Memories is so crazy! it's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuffs. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after other.
• But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.
• In this world, there are things you can do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.
• If you really want something, you have to be willing to pay a price.
• I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish- coleslaw or french fries or a Wham! back up singer.

The Time Keeper - Mitch Albom

I have not gone through all of Mitch Albom's work, but the few I have read are awesome enough to get into my favorite list (Tuesdays with Morrie, The five people you meet in heaven). The time keeper keeps the reputation intact. This book is simply fabulous.

I have always admired Albom for choosing a simple, well known morale/topic; create some simple magical characters; and portray them with a gripping text. 'Simplicity' with 'depth of understanding' and perspective about time is what I adored in the time keeper as well.

"Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes in the hour. And because of this, man alone suffers the paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of running out of time."

Dor, a man from thousands of years ago is obsessed with measuring time. He has a beautiful wife and three kids. But his obsession leads to his banishment from the kingdom and he almost loses his wife. Later after other unlucky sequence of events, he ends up in a cave for thousand of years, where time never moves for him, but he is forced to listen to the lamenting voices of people of earth complaining about time.

Sarah Lemon, a present day teenage girl with low self esteem is in love with a boy. She thinks he loves her back but ends up being publicly humiliated. She thinks, she does not need anymore time.

Victor Delamonte, a filthy rich business man with a loving wife has everything in the world but doesn't have any time. He is terminally ill and is looking for ways to extend his time.

Dor, now described as father time is released from his imprisonment from the cave.  He meets these two people with entirely different background and perspective, and shows them the real value of time. In the process he understands the secret himself.

I did have trouble connecting to the characters in the initial pages of the book, since the writer was moving from one character to another without properly building the background. (But my history shows, I always had trouble in the beginning pages of the best books of my collection. May it be Potter series or Life of Pi or The god of small things. so I needed a bit of patience in the beginning.) After I got hold of the situation, I enjoyed the book thoroughly. There is nothing uniquely special about the story itself, yet it demands your attention and the end revives your perspective of time and what living in the moment really means.

Do read it. Worth every minute of your time.

My favourite lines

• Sometimes, when you are not getting the love you want, giving makes you think you will.
• A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.
• Knowing something and understanding it were not a same thing.
• And when hope is gone, time is punishment.
• It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.
• Ends are for yesterdays not tomorrows.
• There is a reason god limits our days. Why? To make each one precious. 
• With endless time, nothing is special. With no sacrifice, we can't appreciate what we have. 
• We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes we forget what we have. 
• When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness. 
• But fates are connected in ways we don't understand. 
• But you grab a moment, or you let it pass.

The storyteller - Jodi Picoult

"Mr Darcy and Mr Butler will have to wait because I am in love with Leo Stein!"

Humor aside, Jodi Picoult did it again. She was able to cleverly tear her readers heart to million pieces and drown their minds to the grim occurring of the fiction, closely related to the heart-wrenching holocaust. This was truly an 'intense' and 'could not be put down' read.

The story revolves around four major characters:

• Sage Singer, a 25 year old car crash survivor with a facial scar; who is a self proclaimed atheist with a Jewish background; an amazing baker and a loner.
• Josef Weber, a 95 years old lovable and well respected retired German teacher.
• Minka, a holocaust survivor and Sage's grandmother.
• Leo Stein, a FBI agent from DC who specializes in tracking down Nazi fugitives.

Sage meets Josef in one of her grief group session and develops a good friendship with him as he frequents the bakery she works in. As their friendship blooms, Josef asks Sage for a favor. He wants her to forgive her and help him die. Shell shocked, Sage denies, but Josef slowly coaxes her and tells her his deepest, darkest and grave past of being a Nazi SS guard; and how he was involved in the killing of innocent Jews. Sage; confused, angry tries to get help from department of justice and meets Leo. In the process of discovering the truth and finding a witness for the unforgivable deeds of Josef, they cajole Minka to verbally relive her painful past as a holocaust survivor. It was a great mystery because she never shared her war time sufferings with anyone. Slowly the jigsaw puzzle are put into place and they realize Josef was one of the guards who held Minka as prisoner. With all the truth revealed 
and crystal clear, what will Sage do? Is atonement by a culprit, even decades after the horrible crime is done,  forgivable? Is it that easy? Does that do justice to the sufferers; to the dead? The end yields a surprising twist.

The spellbinding part of this book was when Minka described her life; that transformed from a happy normal family with a predilection of being a writer to getting lost in the midst of war. How her and other Jewish family were moved from a happy Jewish community to a Lodz ghetto, and then imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp. How she lost her family, her best friend! Their everyday misery; the insufferable and unimaginable pain of hunger; the instinct of survival. 

I was in tears when Jodi described a Jewish bride in her lacy bridal dress, trying hysterically to find her family members in the concentration camp; or when a mother was expected to work like normal days after her child was murdered by Nazis. It was ruthless and I still cringe at the thought of it.

Josef's description of his war time life as a Nazi made the whole story heavier. Like we were getting a first hand experience of the emotions of a killer. It was bizarre. (I don't want to read Peter's mind in nineteen minutes anymore!)

The other part that I found absolutely astonishing was a story within the story. Some may find it annoying but I loved it. May it be The tales of Beedle the Bard in Harry Potter, An Imperial Affliction in The fault in our stars, or the story of a Polish vampire/beast (Upior) and Ania in The storyteller; I adored it. It was a scurrilously planned distraction to the heart wrenching pain of a holocaust survivor.

Jodi's trademark of first person narration made this story closer to one's heart. Though she did not bother with a court scene which she marvelously portrayed in her other creations, the storyteller surely is one of her best book that I have read so far. 

Why I love Leo? You have to read the book to reciprocate my feelings. 

Happy reading folks!!

My favorite lines from this epic book :

Loss is more than just death, and grief is the grey shape shifter of emotion.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

That's the paradox of loss: how can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man- Simon Wiesenthal

Each memory is like paper flower stowed upon a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I can't imagine how it stayed hidden all this time.

I realise, how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.

If you hide long enough, a ghost among men, you might disappear forever without anyone noticing. It's human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind.

Anonymity, I guess, always comes at a price.

The only monster I have ever know were men.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

Morality has nothing to do with religion. You can do the right thing and not believe in God at all.

what would you grab, if you had to pack up your life in only minutes?

Truth is so much harder than fiction.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too. War. And hope. Oh yes hope.

No more dangerous than living in the present and realizing nothing's changed.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

It's an odd luxury, knowing someone's got my back.

But forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself.

(I just realized I haven't reviewed a book for a long time. It's not that I am not reading books. They are my only salvation right now, admist the ridiculous situations occurring in my surroundings and the world. It's just that my work schedule is a little occupying. But I promise to drop down the randomness more frequently from now on. Ciao!)