Snow Falling On Cedars Quotes
"I’m a slow reader and as I grow older and less patient, there is a test I’ve come to apply to whether a book has been worth reading. Has it, I ask myself, given me any new insight into the frenzied muddle and puzzle that life seems to be?"
"Most novelists attempt to convey a sense of place, but with Guterson we’re taken to a different level of knowledge."
"The book business, like the movie business, increasingly likes to label things. Every new work, however original, has to belong to a genre."
"The court itself, with its groaning, hissing radiators, its grey light, the smell of damp coats and boots, provides the structure of the story and becomes a kind of character itself."
"The snowfall, which he witnessed out of the corners of his eyes – furious, wind-whipped flakes against the windows – struck him as infinitely beautiful."
"In particular, it is the compassionate light its author sheds on how the seeds of racism are sown; on the way man and woman, parent and child, affect each other."
"Even the most minor of these people, however tangential to the plot, is given his or her own journey, their souls etched, like characters in a Chekhov play, by some hidden yearning or thwarted ambition."
"The fear of the sea that was always there, simmering beneath the surface of their island lives, would boil up in their hearts again."
"But all I want to know just now is did he get knocked in the head first and then go over? Because I know from this foam that Carl went in breathing."
"It tells you, for example, that he wasn’t murdered first – say on the deck of his boat – and then thrown overboard."
"You want to play Sherlock Holmes? You going to play detective?"
"The presence of foam in the airway and around the lips and nose indicates beyond doubt that the victim was alive at the time of submersion."
"It’s not one ocean. It’s four oceans – Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. They’re different from each other."
"It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it."
"I don’t know. All sorts of things. You know, a place to think."
"The world was unreal, a nuisance that prevented him from focusing on his memory of that boy, on the flies in a cloud over his astonished face, the pool of blood filtering out of his shirt and into the forest floor, smelling rank."
"It was important for a person to act carefully, for every action, Hatsue explained, had consequences for the soul’s future."
"All of life was impermanent, for example – a thing she thought about every day."
"The greater the composure, the more revealed one was, the truth of one’s inner life was manifest – a pleasing paradox."
"In his face, he knew, was his fate, as Nels Gudmundsson had asserted at the start of things: ‘There are facts,’ he said, ‘and the jurors listen to them, but even more, they watch you.’"
"Everything was conjoined by mystery and fate, and in his darkened cell he meditated on this and it became increasingly clear to him."
"The sword that gives life, not the sword that takes life, is the goal of the samurai."
"He had been meant to meet her on the beach as a child and then to pass his life with her. There was no other way it could be."
"He saw only darkness after the war, in the world and in his own soul, everywhere but in the smell of strawberries, in the good scent of his wife and of his three children."
"Every sentient being straining and pushing at the shell of identity and distinctness."
"Missing you is killing me. It’s like a part of me has gone away."
"Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close."
"To persevere was always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy, and one’s perspective."
"The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably."
"Silence is better. It was something – one thing – she knew with clarity."
"The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else."
"Love was nothing close to what she’d imagined as a girl growing up."
"I'm not talking to you. I don’t want to be married to you."
"The dishonor lay instead in concealing from one’s family the nature of one’s affections."
"We were children together, we played on the beach, and it turned out to be something bigger."
"I always knew, deep inside, it was wrong, I felt it down inside somewhere – this feeling like I loved him and at the same time couldn’t love him."
"In the course of time, grief became a part of her, like her shadow in the sun."
"Love is a shadow in dreams: it found her in her kitchen, at the edge of the sea."
"The snow fell, each flake in its appropriate place, perfectly without confusion."
"To know another's life, you must swim in the same waters that drowned them."
"He carried the silence of the sea; it was his gift, his burden."
"A life is not a story. It is a landscape that one traverses."
"Justice is a fragile thing. It requires belief, not proof."
"In the quiet of the snow, a soft whisper of truth fluttered down like a feather."
"But I hope the jury comes in with the right verdict. I could write a column about that, maybe. How we all hope the justice system does its job. How we hope for an honest result."
"People don’t have to be unfair, do they? That isn’t just part of things, when people are unfair to somebody."
"Everything else is ambiguous. Everything else is emotions and hunches. At least the facts you can cling to; the emotions just float away."
"Float away with them. If you can remember how, Ishmael. If you can find them again. If you haven’t gone cold forever."
"The facts are all that matter," said Ishmael, "and the facts weigh in against him."
"I’ve kept on," said Ishmael. "I’ve kept his newspaper going, haven’t I?"
"Here’s what you should do about being unhappy: you should get married and have some children."
"That isn’t going to happen," said Ishmael. "That’s not the answer to the question."
"Yes, it is," said his mother, "It genuinely, surely is."
"His breath came forth in jets of fog and disappeared into the darkness."
"On certain nights the moonlight had flooded through his dormer window and bathed everything in blue, beguiling shadows that prevented him from sleeping."
"The voice from the radio – it had dropped an octave, altered pitch, slowed and lengthened measurably."
"He slept with each for a few more weeks after deciding he wanted nothing to do with them – he slept with them angrily and unhappily and because he was lonely and selfish."
"He thought of how she’d had her revelation at the very moment he’d entered her."
"His father had died in Seattle at the Veterans Administration Hospital."
"We’re sly and treacherous," Kabuo said. "You can’t trust a Jap, can you?"
"It’s been driving me crazy all these years. I open up my closet and there it is, your goddamn bamboo rod."
"They moved away from this more quickly than they desired but before embarrassment overtook them."
"I was thinking about it," said Kabuo Miyamoto. "I was trying to decide just what I should do. The situation was difficult."
"The truth is as I have just described it. The truth is that I loaned Carl a battery, helped him get his boat started, made arrangements for my family’s seven acres with him, then motored away and fished."
"You must understand, the sheriff had appeared with a warrant in hand. I found myself under suspicion of murder. It seemed to me best not to say anything."
"Your story, then, immediately after your arrest, differs from the one you’ve told today, Mr. Miyamoto. So I ask you – where lies the truth?"
"I guess it comes down to a feeling, doesn’t it? If I feel uncertain, if I feel that I doubt, that’s all that matters, right?"
"The very object of our jury system is to secure a verdict by comparison of views and discussion among jurors – provided this can be done reasonably and in a way consistent with the conscientious convictions of each."
"Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps there is such a thing as fate. Perhaps for inscrutable reasons God has looked down and allowed the accused man to come to this pass, where his very life lies in your hands."
"There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. Your task as you deliberate together on these proceedings is to ensure that you do nothing to yield to a universe in which things go awry by happen-stance."
"He has returned to find himself the victim of prejudice – make no mistake about it, this trial is about prejudice – in the country he fought to defend."
"In God’s name, in the name of humanity, do your duty as jurors. Find Kabuo Miyamoto innocent as charged and let him go home to his family."
"The heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious."