I never stopped loving her," he said. "I couldn’t let her go. Once the past gets you in its clutches, well, you’ve got to want to fight to be released. I never did. That was my mistake.
Perhaps the trick is to find a gentle use for memory. Learn to cup the small and glorious moments in our hands and treasure them, finding some solace this way. Otherwise all they do is remind us that we are too late. That what is lost is lost forever...
Once, when she was trying to explain why she’d returned to Hungary, Marika said, 'Sometimes if you don’t go backwards, you can’t move forwards.' I’d repeated this to my father, hoping he’d be able to unravel her words. But he’d just mutte...
My father spent a long time looking at The Book of Summers, turning each page with solemnity. I watched him, seeing it all again through his eyes. A world that he was never a part of, one that I’d purposefully kept hidden from him, thinking that it...