Quotes from Rachel Kadish

Marrano" was the Spanish word for "pig." Pretty much sums up Catholic Spain's view of Jews.)

An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world. The yellow light of a lamp on leaves of paper, the ivory-black impress of words reasoning, line by line.

Yet illness had taught her already that the body was bound by no rules but its own.

For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

Ignorance is now your great enemy, and I do none any favor by flattering you that you are not ignorant.

I gladly conspire with you, as all we men of philosophy breathe the same air of questions wheresoever we reside.

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 God the tradition spoke of must necessarily wish for the well-being of His creations. Either there was no such God, then....or perhaps there existed only a God who could do nothing to alter the world's evils. Then did God quake in helpless fear at the roar of fire, the cry of a mob? Did God too tremble at times with the rage and confusion?

Why, when the rabbis wished to understand God's will or Augustine the construction of man's soul, did they not reason as Descartes did, taking nothing as given? Must true inquiry proceed from texts and traditions already established, or could the mind on its own perceive all it needed to fathom the world? And which path of inquiry led more straightly to truth? The

A beauty to tempt away a man's better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil.

was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. ?????? An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant "I loved.

He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work. Was that what sadness did to a man?

Yet though I saw myself straying ever farther from the path laid before me, I cried out then and still: why say woman may not follow her nature if it lead her to think, for must not even the meanest beast follow its nature? And why forbid woman or man from questioning what we are taught, for is not intelligence holy? The world and I have sinned against each other.

This is what you Americans do all day, is it? Sit about confessing things. What a rotten influence you are!

they were so tightly knit together that no surgery could separate them without devastating both.

Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she'd been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman's existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.

She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny.

I remade my heart. I learned to conduct myself in love so it could not betray me.

No, not even a line. It was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. ?????? An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant "I loved.

the thinkers' collected voices inked onto each crowded page. An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world.

I told her: I act such that love will not fail again as it failed us before.

How readily the rules of female behavior—gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness—turned to shackles.

He'd not known what was happening to us in Lisbon, Constantina. The full truth of our situation hadn't been told of in England

It was the very shape of the world that defeated our love. There is no bitterness in my heart. Only sorrow.