Quotes from Rosemary Sullivan

My husband's death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave.

When we fall in love at a glance, the question we should ask ourselves (and this would apply to both men and women) is, What is it that we long for? Or perhaps, What are we lacking so that we can turn life in the direction we want? Creativity? Confidence? Authority? Recklessness? Irresponsibility? Or even darkness? Perhaps the lover is the outlaw in ourselves we don't quite have the nerve to claim. (p. 34)

Most people who fall obsessively in love claim that it happens precipitously, unexpectedly [...] But I believe there's almost always a prerequisite. Falling in love in this way will usually occur at a time of transition. We may not be conscious of it, but something has ended and something new must begin. Romantic obsession is like a cataclysm breaking up the empty landscape. Like a strange exotic plant, it grows in arid soil. (pp. 27-28)

But sex as a physical act is merely athletics, a momentary relief. What it needs to be powerful is desire, and the strongest element of desire is longing. It's in the work. Desider-, sidus: from the stars. The longing that reaches beyond space and time.

In attempting to determine how Adolf Hitler had taken control, the US Office of Strategic Services commissioned a report in 1943 that explained his strategy: "Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind."8 Soon hyperbole, extremism, defamation, and slander become commonplace and acceptable vehicles of power.

What would it mean to be born Stalin's daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it?

How strange that the bully, unmasked, is always awash in self-pity.

Buried in the minds of those of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives.

Svetlana did not know how to be alone. Alone, she felt totally exposed. She thought she would be safe if only she could entwine her life in another, but then, once she had achieved this, she would feel suffocated, a pattern that would take her decades to break, if she ever succeeded.

The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door: It is a questions still worth asking today.

Fascism counts on people's credulity, on their craving to believe, on their fear that there is nothing to believe.

Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will not vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged. . . . The

12 Excitement of the hunt! It's an astonishing phrase. Coerced by fear for her life, then seduced by power. Is it possible that one thing we can learn from Ans van Dijk is that totalitarian regimes achieve their power not just through repression but through the seduction of insiderism, which turns people into craven sycophants?

All of them knew me, too. They knew that I had been a bad daughter and that my father had been a bad father, but that he had loved me all the same, as I loved him."21 This was the one fact she had to hold on to, as if, were she to let go of this belief, she would disappear. Once she said, "It was as though my father were at the center of a black circle and anyone who ventured inside vanished or was destroyed in one way or another.

In attempting to determine how Adolf Hitler had taken control, the US Office of Strategic Services commissioned a report in 1943 that explained his strategy: "Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.

house nearby and was given the room where

Anti-Semitism there was mild in comparison to that in many other European countries. Yet the Netherlands transported more Jews to their deaths in extermination camps in the east than any other country in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, 107,000 were deported and only 5,500 returned.

The fact that Otto survived the horror of the concentration camps demonstrated his profound will to live.

When her friend Cor Suijk asked her directly if she knew the name of the betrayer, she asked, "Cor, can you keep a secret?" Very eagerly he answered, "Yes, Miep, I can!" And she smiled and said, "Me, too.

He said God loved me, even if I was Stalin's daughter."7 The remark suggests a depth of loneliness that is devastating.

Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, "There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation-well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.

To those who encountered Otto at the time, he seems to be a man purged by fire, walking through Amsterdam as though in a strange dream, searching for news of his children. Finding out that he was his family's sole survivor must have sent him to a very dark place. Vince hypothesized that Otto's grief had eventually turned into a mission to find the people responsible for the Annex raid, although his motive was not vengeance; he was seeking accountability and justice.

They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, "A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul."3 Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga's words: "You will know your soul when it aches.

Svetlana's responses to her mother would always swing, unresolved, between sentimental idealizations and bitter anger.