"She was history knocking on the door of the heart, and when she came knocking, her message often was opaque, symbolic, evocative. I was left to make of it what I could, but I could not escape the intrusion."
"Don't get too attached to places in life, Peter."
"You see, my dear, the poet has taught us that the abyss is the gateway to man's imagination, and it's imagination which gives us power over ourselves."
"I believe that Saroyan, like all Armenians, was a natural utopian. We have a dream instead of a country. Because territory has eluded us, we have a freedom to invent that most people don't. The more our geography shrinks, the more our imaginations expand, the more we're like owls flying in the dark."
"Because totalitarian regimes always find poets the most dangerous of people, they are often the first to be executed."
"True forgiveness can be granted only after the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution. If the perpetrator government stalks the victims in an effort to prevent the victims' acts of commemoration, there can be no full healing. The victim culture is held hostage in a wilderness of grief and rage, and is shut out of its moral place in history."
"Numbing, Robert Lifton suggests, is a process by which the self distances itself from traumatic experience. It is not repression, which excludes and denies the past, because in numbing one still has the potential for insight and some reclamation of the nightmarish past."
"But the old mind would not smolder in ashes. Once on safe ground, the old mind would reemerge with new vitality."
Black Dog of Fate, Peter Balakian
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