Quotes from Jessica Shattuck

And it means reasonable citizens must take action," Connie continued. "We are not all thugs and villains. But we will become these, if we don't try to make change.

She pictures love as a pond to be stepped into, swum around in, and then climbed out of and toweled off before getting too chilly.

Instead she squeezes Mary's arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.

What does it take for a person to be able to recognize evil as it unfolds? To see with foresight and acuity .

Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn't yet come to knock it down.

There is so much gray between the black and the white and this is where most of us live, trying, but so often failing, to bend towards the light.

This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face.

Germany was being run by a loudmouthed rabble-rouser, bent on baiting other nations to war and making life miserable for countless innocent citizens. And here they were, drinking champagne and dancing to Scott Joplin.

Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

expedience could not take precedence over the pursuit of justice.

The child exasperated Marianne with her endless obsession with possession. She seemed to have absorbed the national sense of aggrievement, as if she, personally, were the victim of some great unfairness.

You are not responsible for your parents' mistakes. The words emerged from her mouth without forethought, inspired by the young man's miserable face. But were they true? Hadn't she taught her own children to accept their father's heroism as part of their inheritance? So wouldn't this also be true in the reverse?

Hitler always said there were too many people on earth. Too many people in Germany – such a small country, so many people … But then of course it turned out his answer to this was not a solution, but a symptom of the disease. He was the rat in the maze that begins to eat the others.

There is not enough air in the room for Marianne and Elizabeth to share. They have learned this the hard way, but acceptance of the fact has made life easier. Now they see each other twice a year, for a weekend in the early summer and for the American holiday of Thanksgiving

They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany's fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses—"Jewish" ideas that led to defeat.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history. Since

I want to say, she begins again, I want to say that I have not always tried hard enough to know. That this 'moral compass' Claire talks about may not have been as helpful in my own personal life as it was in the wider political context. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly from a distance. And what is up close -- what is up close -- she falters -- is harder to make out. In the audience someone coughs. There is so much gray between the black and the white ... and this is where most of us live.

soft, moist air and bouts of low pressure blamed for headaches and illnesses and despair. A brisk autumn wind blew off the Alps

Yet here they were, carrying groceries, holding children's hands, turning their collars up against the wind. As if their moments of truth—the decisions by which they would be judged and would judge themselves—hadn't already come and passed.

Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted—and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion.

He had no skills or smarts or education to distinguish him, which made him just the sort to be taken with the notion that he belonged to a master race

Martin was swept up in the sound—no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself.