Those Who Save Us Quotes
"You’d never suspect it was worth so much blood."
"You have brought spring with you, I can smell the wind in your hair."
"I’m merely keeping her safe until the right fellow comes along. She’ll make some lucky man a good wife."
"I see you now think I’m a hayseed, Fräulein."
"You’d make a very bad one. I can see your every thought on your face."
"You know, I heard that same thing! I guess Miss Big-City Swenson’ll finally have to put that old witch in the home."
"I’d have thought you’d be home in a hot bath by now."
"I didn’t make dinner, she says. And you know why."
"You’re not only a whore, you’re a stupid whore."
"Enough! he bellows. Stop sniveling, you repulsive slut."
"He no longer exists. He belongs to the past, to that other place and time, and all of that is dead."
"I could see the other advantages to the arrangement, ways to use it for the Resistance."
"But not just, like, die. Be tortured first. And they’d kill your kid too."
"I do not feel bad about doing only what I had to do."
"We were told nothing. That was government business."
"You must eat, it is not good for you to eat so little. This is why you are so thin, Trudy."
"Your mom’s in her room, and she’s doing just fine."
"So I ran and ran and didn’t stop until I got home."
"You are the most willing woman I’ve ever known."
"You see, I know you better than you know yourself."
"We Germans, we place a high premium on obedience, of course, but not at the expense of bravery."
"That’s right, little rabbit, go to sleep, I will fetch you when he is gone."
"I often think it is fitting punishment for all the times I could have helped that girl before that terrible day."
"It’s hard enough for me to take time from my schedule to come here."
"You will be forced to wear a badge. You will bring your little girl, dressed in red, hair bouncing in curls on her shoulders and tied with a ribbon, to another child’s birthday party."
"You will drink your own urine in the dark from your cupped hands."
"They will burn you: you, your body, your own beloved and maddening body with its quirks and birthmarks."
"You will have to deal with men to whom you would never have spoken before they became black-market dealers."
"I have always preferred Brahms to Bach; Bach is so mathematical."
"I was there only once, in 1938, when Koch and I were summoned."
"It’s got all those good things, he says, butter and milk and eggs."
"But I do know that there is no justification. No possible rationalization for what the Nazis did, for what civilian Germans permitted and encouraged to happen."
"Yet Anna has lost all trace of whimsy, if ever she had any, and to her this beautiful afternoon is a personal insult, a dirty trick sent to lull her into thinking that everything will be fine now. She knows better. She has seen so many atrocious things happen on radiant days."
"For no apparent reason, they have suddenly become hostile, and to fraternize might be to invite God-knows-what type of punishment."
"I thought I knew you, the Obersturmführer says. I even loved you. Now I find that I don’t know you at all."
"The knowledge that her misery has company is little comfort, and this jubilant springtime display is not to be trusted. Life is a frosted cake made of worms."
"The only conclusion I can draw is that you are a true masochist, a glutton for punishment."
"We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?"
"I did it for you, Trudy. Anything I ever did, it was all for you."
"Let the punishment fit the crime—although, of course, if we were to take that as an absolute, so many Germans would deserve so much worse."
"But the interactions between the sexes? The Ami is indeed naive to describe them this way. Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid."
"But when it is realized that the bullets have been aimed at the low-hanging clouds rather than human targets, the multitude settles."
"Trudie drags on Anna’s arm. She is silently weeping, as is her new habit."
"She will continue this way as long as she is able."
"Anna looks at him and then through the windshield."
"You, says Trudy. You have to be the most German Jew in the entire world."
"Why imprison us? she yells. We’ve done nothing wrong."
"She has the sensation of hovering outside herself, observing."
"You think too much. Stop it. Don’t think. Don’t talk. Just look. Be."
"I do not deserve to have this, he says finally."
"And if one must surrender the memory of the good along with the bad, well, perhaps this is not too high a price to pay."
"In any case, I am not certain how long I will stay."
"But you know, you’ve been out of the swing of things for so long that . . ."
"I don’t understand why you’re reacting this way."
"I don’t want to see you get hurt, says Ruth."
"I thought it was a particularly irritating salesman."
"Go on, get out of here, Trudy tells them with a shooing motion."
"Anna follows the pair to the base of the steps."
"She hears nothing more than the Ami’s deep loud voice."
"I thought you might like to wash, after . . ."
"Anna lunges toward her daughter, but the soldiers restrain her."
"But it’s not the real reason. Is it."
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"There is nothing to say; there is so much to say that Anna will never say it."
"Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends."
"Their scent is powerfully nostalgic, is it not? It is the sole untarnished memory I have of Germany."
"Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right."
"I suppose this is to your advantage as an interrogator, yes? I will be putty in your hands."
"The Mississippi flows beneath her to the left, its currents so slow and powerful that it doesn’t appear to be moving at all."