13 quotes
And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.
Open City (2011)
Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.
Open City (2011)
Sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.
Open City (2011)
I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”
Open City (2011)
Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews.
Open City (2011)
And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.
Open City (2011)
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
Open City (2011)
There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories.
Open City (2011)
WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
Open City (2011)
the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique.
Open City (2011)
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”
Open City (2011)
I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables.”
Open City (2011)
Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?
Open City (2011)