Quotes from Rachel Kadish

Have you ever had to contemplate letting loved ones die at the hand of someone who hates them?

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.

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Hope against reason: an opiate she'd long abandoned.

Then must we abandon our accustomed notion of a woman's kindness, and forge a new one.

At times she could barely speak in response to the rabbi's questions. Other times she could hardly find enough breath for all the words she needed to utter, though the rabbi listened with great patience. On those days the new thoughts so brimmed in her that she felt the white plaster ceiling and the timbers and the brickwork walls couldn't contain her—should she raise her head to speak once more, she'd shake the house down.

he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

The Portuguese and Hebrew words had been finished here and there with high, distinctive arches that sloped backward over the letters they adorned: the roofs of the Portuguese letters sloping to the left, those of the occasional Hebrew verse to the right, the long unbroken lines proceeding down the page like successive rows of cresting waves approaching a shore, one after another, dizzying.