34 Quotes by Tatjana Soli

Why did someone fall in love with you because you are one thing and then want you to be something else?

Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable – its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hoevering doom.

What are the boundaries of charity? When started, where does it morally end?

Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game.

She had broken, become something else. She didn’t know what yet. Could you love someone in the process of changing? She did love Linh. As much as a ghost loved. The mind treacherous.

Helen’s Saigon had always been about selling – chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn’t matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn’t bear that soon she would have to leave.

Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.

But now she did belong to the ravaged city – her frame grown gaunt, her shoulders hunched from tiredness, the bone-sharp jaw line that had lost the padded baby fat of pretty, her blue gaze dark and inward.

She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren’t in vain. As she hoped, with less and less confidence each day, that Michael’s had not been in vain. Too much waste to bear.