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Crossing QUOTES

Crossing QUOTES

1 " Menen hetkeksi istumaan kirkon etuosaan, kaivan laukusta uuden ristikoruni ja ripustan sen kaulalleni, ja kun muuan pappi tervehtii minua nyökkäämällä suuntaani mitä hienovaraisimmalla eleellä, joka on kuin lyhyt siveltimenveto, minusta tuntuu että ymmärrän Suomesta jotakin keskeistä: ihmiset eivä tole epäkohteliaita vaan yksinäisiä, ja he pitävät siitä, että saavat olla rauhassa omissa oloissaan, eivätkä he tarvitse ympärilleen mitään ylimääräistä, eivät pilvenpiirtäjien tuomaa ylellisyyttä tai koristeellisten palatsien hohtoa. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

2 " It's the first thing people notice,' she says despondently. 'Difference. As if it's a crime. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

3 " I wouldn’t yet realize that all human activity is motivated by the desire to be better. People move from one country to the next to secure better living conditions, and nothing is said or done unselfishly, every action entails the promise of a greater tomorrow, the wish that I’ll get something I want, something I think I can’t live without. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

4 " like Do you realize how narrow-minded it is to think that there are only two genders in the world, two types of people, men and women? "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

5 " If death were a sensation, it would be this: invisibility, living your life in ill-fitting clothes, walking in shoes that pinch. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

6 " ...when people don't like you, you don't like yourself either, that's the way it goes, you learn to give certain answers to certain questions because that's the answer the person asking the question wants to hear, and before long you are inevitably caught up in a web of lies, lies that people are forced into telling because the truth doesn't make an impression, because the truth always fails, because it's never good enough.

What can you do if your story, which is so tragic that you imagine it will awaken people's sympathy, instead elicits hatred and violence? "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

7 " Katson häntä ja asuntoa hänen ympärillään, elämää jota hän elää, paikkaa johon hän maailmassa kuuluu, miten osaton hän kaikesta huolimatta on. Opiskelupaikka yliopistossa, tällainen asunto ja tällaiset huonekalut, ystäviä jotka pitävät hänestä huolta, eikä hän näe sitä mikä hänellä jo on, vain sen mikä häneltä vielä puuttuu - kaiketi siksi, ettei halua sitä, mitä hänellä on, yhtä paljon kuin sitä mitä hän ei voi saada. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

8 " It didn’t matter where we ended up, I thought then, because every place I had ever been with him had been a home. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

9 " you are nothing without money here. Without money there is no access to education or health care, and if you look like you don’t have money you won’t get service either. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

10 " In my father’s story, death was preceded by the sun, for it was the sun that ultimately killed him. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

11 " am a man who cannot be a woman but who can sometimes look like a woman. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

12 " I can choose what I am, I can choose my gender, choose my nationality and my name, my place of birth, all simply by opening my mouth. Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

13 " Nothing lasts forever, he said at the dinner table. The beauty of our life is that it ends, that is how it is meant to be, the old make way for the young and for all the children yet to be born, who will make the world a better place, "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

14 " As time passed I realized that I no longer considered myself special or unique, and this is perhaps the worst thing that can happen, for this if anything will make a person passionless, this if anything forces one to believe in God. You clutch the branches you can reach, and settle for your destiny. Only then will you see the light, the fact that the lack of rights and opportunities very rarely leads someone to the fight for them. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

15 " Drag is the royalty of gender, it’s being above gender by performing all genders at once, "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

16 " I haven’t done anything I was meant to do, said my father, and my mother reminded him, We have two beautiful children. The children, he scoffed. Anybody can have children, "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

17 " Finnish people can’t see what a privileged life they lead, as though they’ve never heard of a world outside their borders. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

18 " The Albanian spoken in Kosovo was completely different from ours; it sounded childlike and unsure of itself. People here used strange words, they called a plate a tanir instead of a pjatë, and a drinking glass was called bardak instead of gotë. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

19 " The people were poor, they smelled bad and talked incessantly, nobody seemed to have a job or anything in particular to do, everybody had yellow teeth and damp stains beneath their armpits, and as I looked out across the meadows where my father had walked and the houses in which his family lived I wasn’t remotely surprised that he’d wanted to leave, because there was no room to breathe out here, there was no escape. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing

20 " This life is worth nothing at all; only the next life is worth something. "

― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing