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.