8 Quotes by John von Sothen

When I scanned the room, I saw five or six swaddled newborns and one miniature 1920s actress. Bibi had round eyes the size of saucers, chalky white skin, and dainty fingers that seemed already capable of needlepoint.

Anaïs had one of those bobs with concave bangs French women seem 
to master, which make them look like adorable sixties KGB agents. 


And soon a cold realization hit me: The time for giving up hope and 
letting go was now. It would be my parting gift to her. And as I cried 
into Mom’s ear and held her hand, and told her it was okay to let go, that I’d be fine, I felt her chest rise one last time. There was no long 
continuous beep like you see in the movies. Just a deafening silence 
and my echo of good-bye skipping down the side of her ear like a coin 
down a deep well.

Mom’s approach to cuisine came from her art school days, inspiration hitting her on the spot. The ingredients she chose were paints you’d throw at a canvas, each chosen for its color and texture rather than its taste. If your fava beans didn’t click with the polenta? All you had to do was toss in a kilo of shrimp and the pink would bring out the dull off-white.

No matter how well I could pronounce words or expressions, there was no terroir in my vocabulary. Words all meant the same to me—almost like those black and white letter magnets you stick to a refrigerator. Table, 
Chaise, Connard, Pute, Vélo, Merde were all interchangeable and non-denominational, standing next to each other in my brain like a bad 
haiku. 


We’d found our social groove, and the more these dinners 
clicked, the more I felt like a dinner-jacketed Cole Porter, a gadfly of the Parisian bourgeoisie, a cosmopolitan homme de lettres. 
I also like getting hammered. 


True democracy, the French were teaching me, involves swallowing loads of shit to arrive at a consensual second choice we can now all critique.

The reason fluency isn’t a given is that life isn’t fair. The classroom can only take you so far. There’s preseason and regular season, and players of all sports will tell you, the speed’s just not the same.