Quotes from Rachel Kadish

Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

She'd spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them.

A sickening hope, like a gall in her stomach. 7 November 4, 2000 London Helen was stiff with chill.

Love has mass and volume. Put it into your life; it must displace something. As it has displaced my notion of what was good and important in the world, and substituted this: The knowledge that there is nothing more important than people willing to stand up for the truth of each other. The understanding of what it is to protect another fragile being. The understanding that I, too, will grow old.

How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. 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?

Niet kunnen lezen of schrijven. Nooit kunnen ontsnappen naar een andere wereld, noch een schuilplaats hebben voor de eindeloze stroom dagen.

a household was a creature of bottomless hungers. It ravened for wood and coal and white starch, for sailcloth and bread and ale; for breath and sinew, and life itself, which wreathed away invisibly beneath the press of daily labor like the wax of a lit candle.

Alvaro, who could no more withhold love than he could resist taking in each next breath

In secret I have longed for it, for blindness can never suffice to extinguish the sight of the terrors of this broken world.

that was the style of his generation, to communicate via the safety of pixels on a screen.

Friendship is a physick all its own, and most especially to those such as we, who through the peculiar paths of our thinking must ever be lonely men.

Why must man struggle to live, when he inevitably dies?

They would work together in pursuit of whatever it was their lot to discover. He didn't like her. But neither did he pity her. At least there was that.

Yet the body insists on the struggle for life. Why?

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

What right have they to disdain a martyr?

A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safer pasture

a change of governance that could soon mean different heads lofted in punishment for the telling of different truths. She wanted to breathe the warning into all their ears: never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.

If there be any further freedom than the one granted by excommunication, perhaps it is the freedom not to exist.

My form is neither pleasing nor displeasing," she said. "But I've let the world see how little I care for its verdict.

Philosophy could be severed from life.

For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.

Don't--she bit her lip and held it. Don't turn your back just because it terrifies you. [...] I don't think I'm strong enough, Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub's windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, How do you think people get strong?

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.