Black Dog of Fate Quotes

“And then the Turkish gendarmes and zaptieh went from Armenian house to Armenian house confiscating weapons or anything they thought might be one. If possible, the priest would come to warn each family that the gendarmes or the zaptieh were coming so they could prepare. The zaptieh knocked on Armenian doors any time of day or night, and they preferred coming at night. They came to the Kazanjians, and the Arslanians, and the Meugerditchians, and to the Hovsepians and Haroutiunians and to the Shekerlemedjians. And finally, they came to our house in the evening after dinner. Three men in dark brown uniforms walked into the foyer and through the courtyard and said to my mother that if she did not hand over every gun in the house, we would be killed.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

“Since there was no picture of the old country in our house and since I didn't have one etched in my mind, the old country came to mean my grandmother. Whatever it was, she was. Whatever she was, it was.”
― Peter Balakian , Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, ‘It’s an ancient place, it’s not really around anymore.’ Where had it gone? I asked myself.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“My grandmother’s hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“I came to realize that my grandmother’s stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind’s honeycomb.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“I realized that she was my beloved witness, and I the receiver of her story. When I was a boy, she had showered me with love; now as a man, I could return that love.”
― Peter Balakian , Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“What did it mean for a whole civilization to be expunged from the earth? What did it mean when a people who loved and worked and built a culture on the land where they had lived for three thousand years were destroyed? What did it mean for the human race?”
― Peter Balakian , Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“When a civilization is erased, there is a new darkness on the earth. I could feel dust blowing over dry land, where now blood is part of the rocks, where the water will never run clean again.”
― Peter Balakian , Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

“Had I been a witness to a memory of hers so terrible that it could only be said to me, an eleven-year-old, half delirious with fever, lying in bed between darkness and light? My grandmother had spoken so emphatically that day, in clipped, deliberate speech, as if to say, 'This is a moment to listen.”
― Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past