Michael Paterniti Quotes & Sayings

Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning. — Michael Paterniti

Laughing brings out the good in food. It's good to laugh. If you don't laugh, you're going to magnify. And if you magnify, you're going to die. — Michael Paterniti

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate - the perpetual clusters of Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger King - are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas — Michael Paterniti

This again was the curious thing about Ambrosio, his willingness to live fully inside the moment, whatever its virtue or folly, without regard for the future. — Michael Paterniti

All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating. — Michael Paterniti

Didn't anybody respect tradition, making food by hand, the slow way? Hadn't anyone frittered away a Sunday afternoon at the bodega gorging themselves on the bounty of the land - the sparkling wine, the beautifully constructed chorizo? — Michael Paterniti

Even now, when I imagine Einstein's dendrites and neurons firing as his brain lit upon relativity, I picture Baghdad, with its minarets and modern-antennaed buildings sparkling beneath thousands of phantasmagorical tracers, under Allied attack on a very dark night. — Michael Paterniti

Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins. — Michael Paterniti

we're beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere. — Michael Paterniti

In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative
there always was
but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself? — Michael Paterniti

on his off nights he could forever be the shadowy, multifarious man who blew in and out on a dangerous breeze, sipping whisky before pollinating another dark place with his cowboy mysteriousness. In — Michael Paterniti

Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering. — Michael Paterniti

After the cafes of Paris with their exquisite wines and creamy fromages, crepes and steak tartare
screaming Adore me!
Madrid was these store-bought hunks of unyielding cheese and brick-hard baguettes, consumed in leafless Buen Retiro Park.ll Madrid, dressed as it was, tasting as it did, prideful as hell, didn't care what you thought about it on your junior-year backpacking trip. That was your problem. — Michael Paterniti

It's the drunkenness of all the new things that can be. — Michael Paterniti

Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope. — Michael Paterniti

Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses! — Michael Paterniti

You can count on your enemies," said Emilia now, "but sometimes it's the one who smiles who keeps you up at night." There — Michael Paterniti

If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies." I — Michael Paterniti

Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity. — Michael Paterniti

I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance - and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs. Admittedly, — Michael Paterniti

He'd taught him how to listen to the earth, how to speak to the animals, how to love and look after your kind with ferocity. — Michael Paterniti

Someday, of course, she would light out on her own, following her own riverbed, and though we'd follow as long as she allowed, and though we trusted she'd come and go from our lives with regularity, she would also be a half memory [ ... ] — Michael Paterniti

We continued our strolling, for that is exactly what it was: strolling. This was not something I did in real life, either. It was always more like "rushing," or "hustling," or "guy-walking-like-weird-Olympic-walker. — Michael Paterniti

Mark, she now could see, was destined for a life of absolute logic [ ... ], while she, the Etch a Sketcher, thought herself destined for a life of squiggly lines. — Michael Paterniti

From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality. — Michael Paterniti

At the same time, Ambrosio had given me a brief glimpse of a different, compelling sort of life, a life in which there seemed to be more time for family and conversation, for stories and food, a life I was desperate to lead now as an antidote to my own. It was okay to squander a day, a week, a year, sitting in that telling room, summoning ghosts, because no one saw it as squandering. No, if you squinted a little bit, maybe what seemed like wasted time was, in fact, true happiness. — Michael Paterniti

In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity
or is so insane as to appear sane
who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises. — Michael Paterniti

At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve
cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too. — Michael Paterniti

A story is time itself, boxed and compressed. — Michael Paterniti

There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest. — Michael Paterniti

We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren't exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next. — Michael Paterniti