State Of Wonder Quotes
"Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it."
"This landscape was the one she understood, all prairie and sky."
"Such is your bravery, such is my good fortune."
"You get a letter from your dead husband and you don’t know anything at all."
"Would it alarm you too much to tell you I am often alarmed in this place?"
"I pray like a babbling fundamentalist now that I am in Brazil and tonight I will pray that the letter carrier sends this to you so that you can feel the full weight of my love."
"Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague."
"You get an e-mail from your dead husband and you know that he’s alive out there somewhere."
"The cold and the wind did not matter. Nothing mattered."
"There must be a huge temptation to throw them in the trash if they give you dreams like that."
"Naïveté may be the bedrock of reproduction, the lynchpin for the survival of the species."
"She had lost not only her marriage but her ingenuous self."
"The intimacy of sleeping next to strangers, much less twitching and making noises, was unbearable."
"The great, lumbering guilt that slept inside of her at every moment of her life had shifted, stretched."
"It was made up of grief and great rewards and she needed to remember all of it."
"The trick of Lariam was to figure out which part was the dream and which part was her waking life."
"She didn’t want to scream in front of him and she didn’t want him shaking her arm either."
"It was the plane that smacked of nightmares."
"She looked good in his yellow kurta and pressed trousers."
"They are always leaving. We’ve stayed here longer than anywhere."
"Her work is thrilling, but really, it’s almost beside the point."
"Coming in from all that time in the jungle, that’s not so much to ask. Good sheets, good bath towels—"
"The people around here were very glad to see those people go."
"I liked Dr. Eckman. Every aspect of his visit was a great inconvenience to me but there was something ingenuous about him."
"Nature provides a state of constant turnover."
"A truly open mind is a scientist’s greatest asset."
"He had come a long way and by God he wasn’t going to take my word for the fact that there was a drug in development."
"It’s difficult for me to understand why a woman would choose to do that to herself."
"What boy wouldn’t want to drive the boat? It gives him standing in the tribe."
"He must have been very thoughtful in his research. Had the circumstances been different I could have imagined asking him to stay on."
"Fear can sometimes heighten our powers of observation to a point of great clarity."
"Word travels between the tribes, although I’ve never figured out how it happens as many of them refuse to communicate with one another."
"The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived."
"The human animal is too resilient for it to be otherwise. It is not for me to meddle."
"If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you."
"I never believed in them. Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand."
"You were my student. Believe me, I pounded it all in there."
"It was a red-eye coming back. I’d land Monday morning and have the taxi take me straight to campus."
"Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find."
"You can't change people like that. You can't make a hearing boy out of a deaf boy, and you can't turn everyone you meet into an American."
"In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant."
"I have avoided mirrors my entire life. I have no better sense of what I look like at seventy-three than I did at twenty."
"If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself."
"You can't separate it out when it's someone you know."
"If someone ever told me I could have had a child like Easter I would have done it, only I would have done it a long time ago."
"What I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It is something much greater, much more ambitious than anything we had hoped for."
"To tell you the truth I can't remember. From where I sit I would tell you that having a child is akin to plotting your own death."
"It’s dangerous here, you don’t need to tell me that, but it’s more dangerous there."
"I’m with you," Barbara Bovender said, slipping the second half of her sandwich into one of the many pockets on her dress.
"If my legs looked as good as yours I’d wear one too," Nancy Saturn said.
"I had long hair the first month I was here," Nancy said, nodding at Marina. "They were all over me. As soon as I cut it off I was invisible to them."
"Don’t worry about them," she said. "They don’t report back to anyone."
"It doesn’t matter," Marina said. "No one cares what we’re doing. It didn’t matter before either."
"I think it is safe to say we will be making surgical history today, though God knows we won’t be getting credit."
"You would be amazed at all the things that are possible in a state of deprivation. It’s only a matter of thinking things through."
"I only bring it up now because I don’t want it weighing on you going into surgery."
"We are not in a rush, Dr. Singh, but neither is there an endless amount of time for what needs to be accomplished."
"I realize now I’ve been too cryptic, I’ve kept too much in my head."
"I’ve been trying to organize some things, just in case."
"I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t have liked the story."
"No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait."
"I told them the boy was dead. That would have been the case if it hadn’t been for me."
"In the jungle one tribe knows what another tribe is doing, I told you that, tribes with which they have no obvious means of communication."
"You would take Easter from me now. You never had any intention of leaving here without him and I never had any intention of letting him go."
"He was mine. He was my boy and you gave him away."
"Trust me, you won’t fit in there anymore. You’ve changed."
"Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth."
"It was as if they had waited for him every day he had been gone, holding their burning sticks above their heads, pouring their souls up to heaven in a single voice of ululation until he came back."