Quotes from Rachel Kadish

The request had been impossible to refuse, delivered as it was in Darcy's perennial air of wry cheer—a demeanor Aaron was certain was tattooed onto the English genome, right beside wry despair.

The distances between things are vast," he said. "They are vast.

And a reminder too of the sole faith that still offered her a semblance of comfort-- the faith that history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.

And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

Lying had become her clothing—without it she'd freeze.

I do not refute the divine, but only its false depiction, and my thinking is maligned by any who say otherwise.

Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.

Much as I detest the man, I'll never know the full circumstances behind his choices. Life is muddy. Denying that—thinking there's only one noble path above the fray—can be a poisonous approach to life.

Two walls have dropped from between us: pride and justice. It no longer matters who was right. The Hippocratic oath has no place here - do no harm is the wrong standard for love. Everyone does harm.

God has planted in us endless hungers. Yet we master them in order to live.

If my words cut, then let them cut as the physick's knife, to restore health. And let my own imperfections, numerous as grains of sand, not mar my message.

There's a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you've put history.

Glimpsing the void in your souls, you will by nature wish for that which will fill it at once. It is from this wish that you must be on your guard, and discern the light of true learning from the false.

Truth-telling is a luxury for those whose lives aren't at risk.

Do it, Ester. If you must, then deceive your husband just as you deceived me—but you'll do it with a full belly and a house with children. I wish

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing.

The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink.

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly?

Shakespeare's sonnets. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe.

My grandmother," Ester said, "wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny. She said she wished the Englishman's eyes to see her ever in beauty and joy, and never as something pitiable, for his memory of her was her greatest treasure.

You English can't give a compliment. Not a real one. You don't know how to do it.

and the desire to spare him that grief rose in her like dark well water until she woke, drowning—

I beg of you to rest, to seek healing of the spirit and healing of the body. 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. With the help of G-d, R.

remaining fair-minded as their beloved gallery-in-the-making was threatened by two crammed shelves of strange Semitic lettering.