Christopher Barzak Quotes & Sayings

I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means. — Christopher Barzak

Leaves fell around me, red and gold stars falling through the mist. — Christopher Barzak

You're like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards. — Christopher Barzak

Uncharted territory," I said. "The parts on the maps of our lives that we don't understand. In cartographer's language they call these places sleeping beauties. — Christopher Barzak

The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air. — Christopher Barzak

Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other. — Christopher Barzak

Normal is a setting on a washing machine. — Christopher Barzak

That's what love hotels are for."
"I know," says Ai, "but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he's grateful for the love we share without knowing. — Christopher Barzak

My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day. — Christopher Barzak

Real strength isn't control. It's knowing when to let go. — Christopher Barzak

He was all surface, written on by those who'd pass him, like a love hotel diary. — Christopher Barzak

You're both treated fairly," she said, "but sometimes people require different things for true fairness. — Christopher Barzak

Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are. — Christopher Barzak

Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to. — Christopher Barzak

As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes. — Christopher Barzak

I'm just not sure anyone can describe what God is so easily. If I had my way, I'd take a bit of every religion and science and philosophy, because then maybe the picture of God would be more complete, like a mosaic. I think mostly people pick just one idea of God, but when they do that they end up looking at this one little speck of something that's really big and amazing. They look at that one speck in the mosaic and say, "That's God," and don't see the rest of the picture around it. But — Christopher Barzak

Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world. — Christopher Barzak

You see, that's what's so odd, how everyone thinks they're normal and the truth is no one in the world is normal at all. Isn't that wonderful? — Christopher Barzak

I really do feel like I was born to write and tell stories. — Christopher Barzak

Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment. — Christopher Barzak

Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding. — Christopher Barzak

Only so much truth can exist between two people until it becomes too much, and then they can't bear to be around each other. — Christopher Barzak

Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing. — Christopher Barzak

Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he'd glow. — Christopher Barzak

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through. — Christopher Barzak

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn't dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it's harder to burn memories when you've still got life left. When you're alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret. — Christopher Barzak

In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you. — Christopher Barzak

Transformation is something that obsesses me. What is the soul? Is there a difference between something like a soul and something like a self? Is our identity something we construct, or is it organic and natural? There are all kinds of theories. — Christopher Barzak

Don't ever put your happiness in someone else's hands. They'll drop it. They'll drop it every time. — Christopher Barzak

Just two people in love. — Christopher Barzak