Quotes from Sarah Blake

And one day I got it. I lifted my head from the child's chest I was listening to and realized, with a shock of relief: whatever is coming, comes. That's what holds it all together. We are all of us here in the mess. There's no way around it. And all that I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands...Anonymous but necessary. Vital.

Children there rowed boats, climbed trees, picked mussels, ending every summer day cleaned up and carrying the ice in the silver bucket, the Goldfish crackers, and the Scotch, down to the dock at six, where they'd stand ranged along the splintering wooden boards looking down at the white bodies of the flashing fish, while the grown-ups behind them drank as the sun fell into the sea. The Miltons of Crockett's Island.

Every day something will happen, something new will come. And then, and then. She remembered this urgent push toward the next thing and the next.

Words are nothing but clothes.....The body in love has always been clothed by words that try to conceal. You can't suppress or conceal by concealing, he said.

It won't work." Ogden shook his head. "Less than five percent of this country wants to raise the quotas." "But these are refugees, not immigrants." "These are Jews." "Not all.

Reg was black and Len was white, but together they were neither. Or rather, together they were both.

Ghost stories belong to the middle-aged, thought it's always the young who play the dramas.

Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one's life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.

That moment is the one we still repeat here, over and over again, the ordinary, everyday wickedness of turning away. The American primal scene.

So know yourselves first," she finished. "Then look back and account.

There was nothing to do and not enough time to do nothing in.

He believed in the people on the ship, believed they could steer clear of what was wrong. That was the evil these days laid bare, surely—this sustained, precious belief that everyone could see it all clearly, the hope that someone would come to stop it, that there would be people who could stop it, doomed them instead.

was a team player only until he was handed the ball. And then he simply had to run with it. The sort of man who could not hand it off, as he ought to, the sort of man who would risk the game to score a point. The wrong sort.

Undismayed by the ordinary evil of the world, he had the place and the power to make good, to do good. And he did so. He believed one could do right. He had been raised to expect that one could. His was the last generation for whom those givens remained as undisturbed as a silk purse.

And when the man had touched his bow to the string, touched and then drawn the bow across, holding that long first note, Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one's life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.

Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with songs of linnets and thrush. There were things being broken we had no American names for.

Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned.

If there are places that hold us, keeping us in them, surely too there are people, he felt, people who work like mirrors for the selves we have forgotten.

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns—when someone puts a hand down, pushes open one particular gate, and steps through. A man saying no instead of yes, two hands grasped on a dark street.

That moment is the one we still repeat here, over and over again, the ordinary, everyday wickedness of turning away.

The excitement of resistance two years ago, when it had seemed certain the Führer's inordinate excesses, his purges, his insanities would yield a revolt among his own ranks and knock him out of power, had been flattened into quietude by the steady, unsleeping machinery of the Reich operating in plain sight.

The Mouse, she was nicknamed

Like voices humming along a telegraph wire, Evie thought. That was how to teach it. One could rest one's hand upon the past, feel the vibrato, one could close one's eyes, lean low and listen hard. If you were paying attention, one could hear the voices underneath the past. And that was time.

Nothing is inevitable; everything is tangential, particular—human.