Reif Larsen Quotes

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge.”

— Reif Larsen

I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

— Reif Larsen

I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions

— Reif Larsen

“I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.”

— Reif Larsen

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”

— Reif Larsen

“Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?”

— Reif Larsen

“Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand.
If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards
many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating
doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS."
I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said.
Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte.”

— Reif Larsen

I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.

— Reif Larsen

“I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.”

— Reif Larsen

“Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?”

— Reif Larsen

“I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room.”

— Reif Larsen

“A novel is a tricky thing to map.”

— Reif Larsen

“One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!”

— Reif Larsen

“A text is evolutionary by its very nature.”

— Reif Larsen

“I just get a feeling sometimes that everything is predetermined, and I am going through the motions of tracing an existence that will be what it will already be.”

— Reif Larsen

“What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.”

— Reif Larsen

“Whenever I smelled the same perfume on other women, no matter where I was, I was instantly transported back to that feeling of discovery. The sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth's wing.”

— Reif Larsen

“The mountains sighed with the weight of the heavens on their backs.”

— Reif Larsen

“Doodles were fertile ground; they were the visual evidence of heavy cognitive lifting. Although this was not always true: Ricky Lepardo was a doodler and he was not a heavy cognitive lifter.”

— Reif Larsen

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.

— Reif Larsen

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

— Reif Larsen

“I suppose he represented the worst of what rural life can do to a man: he was racist, uneducated, and badly in need of dental work.”

— Reif Larsen

I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection, he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.

— Reif Larsen

“N.B.: Do you think the artist becomes more critical to society in wartime? M.D.: The artist is always critical to society, even though the artist must end up hating society. War happens when society forgets its artists. N.B.: War happens for many reasons. M.D.: War happens for only one reason: we cannot see past our own death.2 No”

— Reif Larsen

“All of a sudden, she was enveloped by a kind of vertigo
she had felt this sensation before, though she could not remember when. It was a feeling of being not herself, of being trapped in the wrong body, as if she had recently been miscast in a play that was her own life.”

— Reif Larsen

“Of the seventeen thousand prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng, only seven survived.”

— Reif Larsen

“WHEN ASKED, CHARLENE had always explained away her life as a series of false starts that finally had disqualified her from running the race.”

— Reif Larsen

It was not uncommon for his father to toss out the phrase "Jebem ti supu od klinova Isusovih!" which translated roughly as "Fuck the soup made from the nails of Jesus's crucifixion," and not think twice about it, even if in English he was unfailingly polite.

— Reif Larsen

“Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha”

— Reif Larsen

“As much as she might argue otherwise, his mother was a fragile woman.”

— Reif Larsen

“The threat of her relapsing had created a strong gravitational field around their little family and was part of the reason he had never left home. He”

— Reif Larsen

“And yet sometimes we become the person we most dread. Or maybe we dread most the person we know we are to become.”

— Reif Larsen

Were I to spend my life commenting on the world that I see, I would never see the world.

— Reif Larsen

“Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.”

— Reif Larsen

“Part of being a writer is knowing when what you write is really bad.”

— Reif Larsen

How many snapshots in the world were actually just-after shots, the moment that elicited the shooter to press the button never captured; instead, the detritus just following, the laughter, the reaction, the ripples.

— Reif Larsen