Quotes from Rachel Kadish

If we looked through the eyes of history, we'd live differently. We'd live right.

She'd never learned to measure out love: give so much, withhold so much.

What had drawn a non-Jewish woman of her generation to this obscure life as a specialist in Jewish studies?

Mustn't desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life's purpose? And mightn't its very denial then be a desecration?

Yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

He gave a hum of recognition. 1657. The early days of the readmission of Jews to England, after nearly four centuries of official expulsion.

Yet what does harm," she said, "is not what truly merits a man's anger, but what he seizes on instead.

What was there to stop him from choosing some completely different life, after all? Nothing but the fact that he'd never wanted a different life.

This blessing," she said to him. "To dream such glad dreams that you wake laughing.

Ester saw that she'd used belladonna drops to dilate them, sacrificing the day's vision for the chance to seem to Thomas more melting, more womanly.

Some women, Ester, like to believe their hearts are made of glass, which must shatter if they so much as think of a sin. Oh Ester, shatter

Ester lay silent under the cover, willing herself toward the sweet sleep she now craved more than almost all else. The death of each day's life. End it, she thought. End this day's life if the world holds mercy.

such a God as the theologians would have us pray to—a God who in a world of suffering aids some but not others—cannot contain the mercy ascribed to him. Therefore, I say: such God as we pray to does not exist. And to this I add: there is no divine intervention. There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill. This is the purview and millstone of the philosophe.

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?

She'd been wrong to think the universe cold, and only the human heart driven by desire. The universe itself was built of naught but desire, and desire was its sole living god.

So said the old man: As a boy I gathered fruit from the trees planted by my forebears. Am I not, then, required to plant the trees that will sustain my grandchildren?

Books have a sound too - turn their pages for enough hours and years and you start to rely on it, just as people who live by the shore assimilate the rhythm of the waves: the sweep and ripple marking the end of a page, a sound that seems to be made by the turning of your thoughts rather than the movement of your hand.

It is an error not only of soul but also of body, for they that muster for the next world before it has come can only betray their lives in this one.

Here it is. I left this for you. As though an ancient library had breached the border into now, into the life of Aaron Levy, who had not until this moment understood how powerfully he needed something like this. He extended his fingertips. "Wash your hands," Helen snapped from behind him.

You're a student?" John flushed as though the question were both compliment and accusation. "I was. Or am." He shook his head. "That is, I will be again, if I'm to have my say in the matter.

To study with an able mind is to escape prison, for a time.

Ester wanted to take him in her own thin arms and race him to some imagined place of safety.

It is not God's will," Aaron quoted, "that Jews should wager on the Messiah as dicers will.

He would survive working with Helen Watt—even as the thought occurred to him, he recognized it as a stroke of genius—by pretending she was a different sort of person. He would act as though she were a woman with a sense of humor.