34 Quotes by Tatjana Soli

Long ago she had become more ambitious than feeling. She had fallen in love with images instead of living things. Except for Linh.

Helen didn’t yet understand that conjuring up the future was the duty of the living, what they owed to the dead.

Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.

It had always fascinated her – what happens when things break down, what are the basic units of life?

We are a people used to grief. Expecting it even.

The only tangible evidence of the enemy’s existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.

This is what happened when one left one’s home – pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn’t realized she missed.