Quotes from Julie Orringer

Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Varosliget, the young dancer who had loved Sandor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. 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.

The [bird's] nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

But if you'd told him, wouldn't it confirm what you most wanted to hide? That there was something wrong with you? Not that you were crazy, maybe. You knew you weren't your mother. But what might happen once the baby was born? New mothers lost it all the time. Ordinary ones, who didn't carry what you carried.

with her husband as she

Varian had to remind himself that these were not merely political ciphers, nor scrawled signatures, nor ghostly photographic images; they were human beings, real men and women whose genius placed them at risk, who were in peril, in concentration camps, in hiding, or worse, living in plain view, ignorant to the threat of their own lives.