Quotes from Julie Orringer

I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.

And what if I fail?" "Ah! Then you'll have a story to tell.

I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer." "What's it mean?" "The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.

He allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past.

Dear Madame Morgenstern, As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck

The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.

He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence.

Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate.

when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.

Practice at hunger makes the fast easier.

He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now - that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.

Nothing at all to change: what a thing to want in the midst of war.

It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.

Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her

a newborn with a mother whose mother came undone.

puerile passion.

Everything, you understand, will threaten the baby's life forever. Somehow you have to survive this.

He could almost see insider her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shit deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands