How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Tiny people, insects, really, slipped out from behind the curtains, opened their mouths, and with their voices gilded the walls with their yearning, their grief, their boundless, reckless love that would lead each one to separate ruin. (1.8)
Oh look, more metaphors. What's happening here is the combination of wonder, newness, reckless passion, and ruin Mr. Hosokawa observes onstage when he first goes to the opera Rigoletto. That moment of exploring opera foreshadows the exploring he'll do in the hostage crisis, a moment when he's reckless and in love for the first time in his life. Does it also end in ruin, and was it worth it? Depends how you see it.
Quote #2
…within a matter of days after [Simon and Edith Thibault's arrival in the host country as ambassadors from France] a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. (2.20)
Sometimes what we find when we explore is what was there all along. That's what happens to the Thibaults when they're assigned as diplomats to the host country, somewhere they didn't want to move. Like discovering you like your brother after all while you're both stuck camping in the rain with your weird cousins, the Thibaults remember they're in love when they go somewhere they weren't planning on.
Quote #3
How quickly one could form attachments under circumstances like these, what bold conclusions a man could come to: Roxane Coss was the woman he had always loved; Gen Watanabe was his son; his house was no longer his own; his life as he knew it, his political life, was dead. Ruben Iglesias wondered if all hostages, all over the world, felt more or less the same way. (2.149)
Strange how being stuck in one place as a hostage lets Ruben Iglesias explore all sorts of new emotions. He'd probably have thought such ideas were completely crazy a few hours before, and now they just start popping up all over his brain. Sometimes danger is the gateway to exploration. Just ask Indiana Jones.
Quote #4
Every last one of them came, until there were fifty-eight people in the room, and when he finished Tetsuya Kato bowed his head while they applauded. Had there not been a need for a pianist there was little chance that Kato would have sat down that afternoon to play, though he had watched the piano the way the other men watched the door. He would not have chosen to draw attention to himself, and without his playing the story might have missed him altogether. But there was a need, a specific request, and so he stepped forward. (4.107)
Kato is seriously lucky when he gets to become Roxane Coss's accompanist by playing piano here. It's like a high school musician finding out that Lady Gaga's band is delayed in traffic and she desperately needs someone to play backup for a show, and then getting invited to join in for the next tour. Here, it's the dire necessity for an accompanist that gives Kato the courage to explore his piano talents in public. Like a lot of people in Bel Canto, he discovers a new role for himself because of a need created by the crisis.
Quote #5
There was one other person there who understood the music, but she was not a guest. Standing in the hallway, looking around the corner to the living room, was Carmen, and Carmen, though she did not have the words for it, understood everything perfectly. This was the happiest time of her life and it was because of the music. (5.205)
Carmen's whole world opens up when she encounters the art and music in the house, not to mention the community they lead to. What she expected would be a terrorist kidnapping actually becomes an exploration of things she'd never known before.
Quote #6
So Ruben opened up the drawers and cabinets and Simon Thibault began his systematic inventory, wire whisks and mixing bowls, lemon squeezers, parchment paper, double boilers. Every imaginable pot in every imaginable size, all the way up to something that weighed thirty pounds empty and could have concealed a small-boned two-year-old child. It was a kitchen that was accustomed to cocktail suppers for five hundred. A kitchen braced to feed the masses. (6.133)
Exploring the kitchen may not sound as cool as, say, going to the Caribbean. But Patchett makes it feel like they're venturing into an exciting place, full of new possibilities—and for adults, not just toddlers banging pots and pans together for the first time. The kitchen in the novel is the place where several of the hostages gain more power over their own lives, a place where they get to be creative even though they're prisoners. It's also the place where several hostages and several terrorists work together to feed their community, and that changes the dynamic between the groups. Oh, and it's also the place where Gen and Carmen agree to meet in the china closet, so it's the beginning of their exploration of language and love together.
Quote #7
"I could have had one life but instead I had another because of this book my grandmother protected," he said, his voice quieter now. "What a miracle is that? I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to this book." (7.122)
In this novel, exploring beauty is sort of like exploring some faraway country you've always wanted to visit, whether it's full of tropical beaches or rugged mountains. That's what Fyodorov gets out of his art book, and it goes for the whole experience in the house, too. Once you start, it's hard to stop.
Quote #8
He [Gen] had never said I love you to either his parents or his sisters. He had not said it to any of the three women he had slept with in his life or the girls in school with whom he had occasionally walked to class. It simply had not occurred to him to say it and now on the first day of his life when it might have been appropriate to speak of love to a woman, he would be declaring it for another man to another woman. (7.132)
It's tough being a translator. When Gen is having that butterflies-in-the-stomach, just-fell-in-love feeling about Carmen, he has to go and translate for Fyodorov. That means telling Roxane that Fyodorov is in love with her, when Gen was kinda more in the mood to confess his own love to Carmen. Irony again. At the same time, it seems like Patchett wove these two stories of love into the same chapter for a reason. Both Fyodorov and Gen are exploring something new through their love, and in a way they do it together. All because Fyodorov needs translation help.
Quote #9
Ishmael put his gun between his feet and looked at them. He would live in this house? He would stay on? He would have a job and earn his own money? He knew he should laugh and tell them to leave him alone. He should make a joke of it himself: No, he would never be caught dead living in such a place. That was the only way to manage if you were the person being teased. Laugh back at them. But he couldn't. He wanted too much to believe they were telling him the truth. "Yes." That was all he could say. (9.145)
Exploration doesn't have to be big and dramatic in this novel. Ishmael's never had the chance to do things most teenagers consider normal, like having a regular summer job. He's probably never even scooped ice cream. Ruben and Oscar genuinely want to offer him another life, and Ishmael is exploring that possibility. No wonder it feels genuinely exciting after the life he's led.
Quote #10
The future never even occurred to Roxane Coss. She had become so proficient at forgetting that she never considered the wife of her lover anymore. She was not concerned that he ran a corporation in Japan, or that they did not speak the same language. Even the ones who had no real reason to forget had done so. They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them. Lothar Falken thought only of running around the house. Victor Fyodorov thought of nothing but playing cards with his friends and gossiping about their love for Roxane Coss. Tetsuya Kato thought of his responsibilities as an accompanist and forgot about the rest. (10.94)
It's weird how forgetting what they know lets all these people explore a new life. But it's also kinda weird when regular life intrudes again. How are they going to reenter their ordinary realities? Um, awkward.