Quotes from Ruth Gruber

Everyone can look inside his or her soul and decide what he or she can do to make a world at peace, to end this fighting that goes on every day around the world.

The passionate love of a mature woman.

How does one comfort a young woman whose body must hunger for her husband? How does one help her mourn? How does one comfort the wives and mothers and children of dead soldiers?

Mama wept openly. "If I don't die now," she cried, "there is no death.

Arik was the master of caesarean sections. Arik could perform a caesarean in three minutes.

If the umbilical cord prolapsed—if it came out first—then the head of the baby could press down on the remainder of the cord and stop the flow of blood and oxygen.

Raquela stood at her side. "Your baby was stillborn. But you're all right." The mother screamed, "Even this they deny me! They take away my land. My freedom. Now my baby. Let me die. I want to die.

The mufti and his terrorists had achieved their goal: a spectacular capitulation from the British.

What does your friend Abdullah mean, they were here before us? Abraham was here more than four thousand years ago. Thousands of years before Mohammed, who died, if I remember right, in A.D. 632.

They'll give you the ein hora—the evil eye.

You know a man," Papa had always said, "by his anger.

Why should one expect that a woman great in intellect should not love greatly, too?

Work and study, theory and practice: the two must go hand in hand. You must not stop studying because you work, and you must not stop working because you study.

But the other face of British rule now showed itself naked and clear: political expediency in its most treacherous form; betrayal of the promise and the hope; surrender to the Arabs for their petroleum favors.

Tragically, most of the Jews of Italy have been deported or massacred.

To let the famous brain surgeon into Palestine would mean helping the Jews. The British would sooner throw him in jail.

Thirty-nine. A widow. Trying to fill her sons' needs. Trying to be both mother and father. Careful not to demand too much of the boys.

American GIs gave the morphine syringe each front-line soldier carried to the doctors and medics to alleviate the suffering of the half-dead concentration-camp victims.

Beware of Mrs. Meir. She is a formidable person.

I was born in Poland. In Lodz. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. But a Jew couldn't study medicine in Poland.

Could a child who had never been inside a house, who had never seen a bathtub, or a flush toilet, who had long forgotten what his parents looked like before they were shot or burned, ever be normal?

You've never known what it is to live in the diaspora, in a country like Poland where you're hated for one crime—being a Jew.

Does every young woman, she wondered, discover herself through the eyes of the men who love her?

This too was hospital practice. To have congratulated her before the afterbirth was out and whole might bring bad luck.