"Tiger's Wife"

The village's story was mostly told in a narrative device typified by this sentence: 'And of course Marko Parović can tell me nothing of how the apothecary must have felt at the first appearance of Luka’s deaf-mute bride,'

• The sign will not tell you that, once you have turned onto the path, you have effectively committed to spending the night.
• Everyone will see you, but no one will look at you.
• My grandfather, of course, never mentioned the winter of his own great illness, a fever that ripped through the village—despite the apothecary’s best efforts, my grandfather was the only child under the age of twelve to survive it, six buried in the snow, his entire generation, even Mirica of the oleander leaves.
• The shop represented a magnificent kind of order, the kind of pleasurable symmetry you just couldn’t get from coming home with the right number of sheep.
• The devil was Crnobog, the horned god, who summoned darkness.
• The musket had made its way to the village through a series of exchanges that differed almost every time someone told the story, and went back nearly two centuries.
• To make matters worse, an estranged aunt had once allegedly lifted him from his crib and praised heaven for what a beautiful baby, what a gorgeous, fat, blessed, rosy child he was—forever sealing his destiny to be impoverished, crippled, struck down and taken by the devil at some unexpected time, in some terrifying way.
•  But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger’s wife shouldered the blame for the villagers’ misfortunes.
• So because they did not know, as he knew, that the tiger was concrete, lonely, different, he did not trust what they said about the tiger’s wife.
• He wondered why it didn’t occur to anyone to know other things—to know, as he knew, that the tiger meant them no harm.
• ... the kind of following the apothecary had once again, now that everyone knew, without having to talk about it, that he had saved them from her, that he had been the cause of her death.
• But they attached their anxious grief to the girl so they could avoid looking past her to what was coming. After her death, their time with her became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks

I'm not too taken with "the deathless man" story:
__ "Suddenly they remember things they have to do, people they have forgotten. All that refusal, all that resistance. Such a luxury.”
__ “The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.”

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