Tatjana Soli Quotes

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

— Tatjana Soli

“Pictures could not be accessories to the story
evidence
they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.”

— Tatjana Soli

“The hardest thing was to give meaning to what appeared to have none.”

— Tatjana Soli

“She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather, that they fell in love through repitition, just the way someone became brave.”

— Tatjana Soli

“Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given.”

— Tatjana Soli

“What was the point of living through history if you didn't record it?”

— Tatjana Soli

“She was his country; she was what he would miss until they were back together.”

— Tatjana Soli

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

— Tatjana Soli

“Too many heroes in my life. All gone.”

— Tatjana Soli

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.

— Tatjana Soli

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

— Tatjana Soli

“Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.”

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli

“Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.”

— Tatjana Soli

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

— 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.”

— Tatjana Soli

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

— Tatjana Soli

“She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turning from life into history terrified her.”

— Tatjana Soli

“Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.”

— Tatjana Soli

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

— Tatjana Soli

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

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli

“Ard to trust that after so much had been taken, so much could still be received.”

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli

“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.”

— Tatjana Soli