Great House Quotes
"His reasons were vague, but the gist was that he had a secret self, a cowardly, despicable self he could never show me."
"It seemed that all there was of the world was that long rain and the need to keep the bolts fastened."
"In the weeks that I lived alone with the piano, before they came to take it away, I would sometimes pat it as I passed in just the same way that I had patted R."
"Paul said he thought he might know someone, a poet, a friend of a friend, who was going back to Chile and might need a foster home for his furniture."
"There was a cautiousness in that initial greeting, before he knew who it was on the other end, that I later came to associate with Daniel Varsky, and with Chileans, few as I’ve met, in general."
"The only more or less empty surface was the walls, bare aside from a few maps he’d tacked up of the cities he had lived in."
"Suddenly I felt awash in gratitude to their owner, as if he were handing down to me not just some wood and upholstery but the chance at a new life."
"We talked then of Polish poetry, of Russian poetry, of Turkish and Greek and Argentine poetry."
"I didn’t know much about what was happening in Chile, at least not then, not yet."
"After the coup they became somber, and then they became cryptic, and then, about six months before I heard he’d disappeared, they stopped coming altogether."
"The words dried up like leaves and blew away."
"But now every word I dredged up seemed lifeless and false."
"You want to know? he said. I’m asking, I told him. All right, he said, between you and me, I’ll tell you."
"I think of her kind eyes and the little red smiley faces she used to draw on my papers, and I begin to relax."
"Dear Mrs. Kleindorf, My wife is dying upstairs."
"The smell of the floor polish mingling with unwashed skin I remembered, and the dry feel of chalk dust in the air."
"Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science, but never any unit on death?"
"DO YOU LIKE THAT, my boy? I thought you would."
"It was a flat and crude painting, terrible actually, like something out of one of those paint-by-numbers kits."
"The painting was nailed to the wall. Such is life, my boy: if you think you’re original in anything, think again."
"The very last time I will ever look on the face that I spent a lifetime studying."
"Suddenly I needed to know. He would have had to spend the night digging."
"You have no toilet paper? one of the kids piped up."
"To taste, to touch, to breathe in, to eat and stuff yourself—all the rest lives in the shadow of uncertainty."
"What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them?"
"You were always too afraid of being made a fool."
"Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more miserable it did."
"Unless one is happy to worship, and I never was."
"Ours is the home of two different species. Here in this house live two different species, one on land and one in the water, one who clings to the surface and the other who lurks in the depths, and yet every night, through a loophole in the laws of physics, they share the same bed."
"Like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion."
"I’ve come to report a crime. I gave up my child."
"The astonished man stood under the ceiling: Who can that be? Who in the world can that be?"
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
"It’s something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are."
"Anxiety, vague and subterranean, began to encroach on me whenever I was in the library."
"What has killed all the hedgehogs? I thought as the tea bag steeped in the steaming water."
"The sky was almost black with an approaching storm, everything eerily silent."
"Though soon enough we reached Folkestone, drove the car onto the train, and left England behind."
"Speaking as indirectly as we were, transferred between us was only a feeling, or a shift in feeling."
"Who lives here? I asked, trying to sound unimpressed."
"I tried to catch Yoav’s eyes, but as far as I could tell he was oblivious to the resemblance."
"When I asked if he’d noticed that our host was a dead ringer for Himmler, Yoav laughed."
"Gigi led the way up the stairs, still nibbling at his cookie."
"Maybe it was because he saw the world differently now."
"But Weisz let go of Yoav’s arm and stopped in front of me."
"Come again, Leclercq said, though of course we never would."
"Sometimes, waking early before the others, I had the sense that the world has an order."
"Listen, Dov. We’re running out of time, you and I."
"Because if you came here to be confirmed in what you have always believed about me, you’re bound to succeed."
"What do you say, Dov? Or don’t say anything at all. I’ll take your silence as a yes."
"How can I explain it? The way you frightened me a little."
"I have no idea, no idea at all, what his thoughts were about the afterlife."
"We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone."
"Afraid to say the wrong thing, I’ve said nothing at all."
"You who had always been so gifted at giving up, of letting go, of making yourself lighter and lighter, less and less."
"A fraction of pure, monstrous existence free of all landmarks, of the most exhilarating terror."
"Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself."
"I understood, then, what deep within myself I had always understood: that I could never punish her as much as she had already punished herself."
"Death that invaded every corner, and left so little room."
"My love for her was a failure of the imagination."
"The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host."
"I always put them to sleep together in the same room, I taught them not to be afraid when they woke in the middle of the night not knowing where they were."
"How much we might have said to one another, he and I. We who collaborated in her silence."
"In the end it all came to nothing, I told Gottlieb, or almost nothing."