Quotes from Rachel Kadish

One out of three." He spoke quietly but with an intensity she instantly feared. "One out of every three Jews in the world. In my country, in Poland, nine out of every ten of us died.

You name a country, and I'll tell you about a time it became obsessed with killing Jews.

A woman may in some circumstances acquire what she desires without the protection of a man." She regarded Ester. "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.

Yes, and how did Josephus know?" continued Helen. "He wasn't on Masada, he was with the Roman army.

Let the pages burn, for such be the fate of the soul, that all our striving be dust, and none in the bright living world ever know truly what once lived and died in another heart. And let me dispense with my foolish dream of leaving the tracery of my thought whole, perhaps to be read in an age in which there is greater kindness. It is not such an age. Let the truth be ash.

She said to him then, crisply, "Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

This was before the Nazis settled on a more efficient method—machine-gunning Jews into the Babi Yar canyon, thirty thousand in two days.

They just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush.

No escape to other worlds, nor refuge from the endless river of days.

She pressed her fingertips into the hard wood of the handrail until they whitened. She would constrict the world to a pinhole.

So Mary spoke always, posing each declaration as a question, soliloquy in guise of conversation.

She'd come here in order to be in a place where polite lies weren't possible

Can you imagine, Lizabeta chided me for my anger? I, who was nursed on her sorrow. Yet she said she'd not succeeded with me—for she'd hoped to teach me to despise a prison, be it made at the hand of the Inquisition or by my own heart.

The fire had forged them both—she and her brother—into brittle instruments. Should she bend, she would break.

No star remained now to navigate by.

But it was her life rather than her words that gave the plainest counsel.

My mother was so angered by love's failures, Mary, that she navigated with spite as her compass.

desire was the only truth worth following.

What sort of life is possible—with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

She said that standing between my mother and this man was like standing in the current of a river. She said it was a soft, endless . . . push, which slips you off your feet if you're not anchored to something.

And I hated him for not breaking the world apart so he could be with us.

Deus sive Natura.

Love didn't fail, Constantina. Only one love did. It failed because we asked too much of it, he and I. We each, in our own time, asked it to remake the world.

Something about him, it was true, did seem to make certain people angry. Certain women. He generally found it amusing.