Quotes from Rachel Kadish

But I will tell you what I learned after I lost my sight... I walked through rooms that had once been familiar, my arms outstretched, and was fouled and thwarted by every obstacle in my path. What I learned then, Ester, is a thing that I have been learning ever since... The distance between things are vast, he said. They are vast.

history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.

Yet will you love a woman, if she prizes truth over softness?

Yet a moment later she resumed walking with the air of someone too depleted for skepticism—her defeat displaced, unaccountably, by trust.

But it seemed to him nonetheless that the god these people had just prayed to was the present: a world in which they felt compelled to act, stepping into the history flowing right in front of their feet; making choices in the knowledge that they might fail.

Thomas watched wealth, it struck Ester, the way some men watched a sunset.

It's getting old"—he said—"your stoic-Britons-confront-the-impatient-American thing.

he no longer had enough faith in anger's utility to pursue its course.

he was an increasingly dangerous manipulator of the people's desperate hopes.

creature doing its delicate work, scratching to gain entry. To the Esteemed

I was ever ill-suited for this world and could not bend my nature to it.

She sat back, lifting away her hand. The ghost of its warmth remained on Aaron's skin.

Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza's radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza's mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. 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.

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. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.

Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

Her spirit could not be bent, yet her rage found little purchase . . .

When any man of any nation cries out in his wish to know God, then his questions merit considering.

There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill.

you'd have understood how easily the blade of spite turns in one's hands, and cuts one's own palms.

I believe the only lesson Thomas took from Oxford was that he detested schooling.

Read the newspaper, Aaron's father liked to say, you'll grow to be an educated man.

no classes or exams, just acres of time in which to research and write—had swiftly revealed itself to be a glorified form of orphanhood.

The world too much hates a freed thought or heart.