Quotes from Rachel Kadish

Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself--or not give yourself--of your free will.

Love isn't rest. Love requires you, from time to time, to rip up your soul and replant it. To dare your lover to do the same. To muster sympathy where it seemed impossible. To be, perpetually, two kids joining hands, drawing breath, and deep diving.

Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there's no audience, life is simple. It's just doing what you know in your gut is right.

A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

She'd spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.

Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.

The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester's world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?

You're American," she said simply. "You think straightforwardness is a virtue.

For every loyalty, whether to self or community, does impose a blindness, and each love does threaten to blur vision, as few can bear to see truth if it harm that which is dear to us.

The greatest act of love—indeed, the only religion she could comprehend—was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.

Do you wonder, ever," said Ester quietly, "whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we're determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

I understand why we sleep. To slip the knot of the world.

She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she'd failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she'd once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.

Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind, but for a woman there could be no such luxury... How readily the rules of female behavior--gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness--turn to shackles. So, she thought, there must be declared a new kind of virtue: one that made the throwing off of such rules, and even such deceit as this required, praiseworthy.

woman must have a heart made of something tougher, or she dies when a first blow comes.

That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?

Sentiment would undo her - each of its ties were a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior - gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness - turned to shackles.

Indeed, for the first time in her life she almost could see her heart, and to her astonishment it seemed a brave and hopeful thing: a small wooden cup of some golden liquid, brimming until it spilled over all...

If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you'll carry on your shoulders the weight of a thousand wives' wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.

And she thought: don't trust love unless you can see what it costs the lover.

I'm an ivy twined so long against a tower of strange design that I cannot now assume any other shape.