Rose Under Fire Quotes
"It's not that cold here. Anyway, I'm used to being cold."
"How could it have happened? I don’t know how it happened. I LOST THEM."
"It just keeps going relentlessly on and on and on, like a concentration camp roll call when they can’t get the numbers to come out right."
"I remember standing through a roll call in the dark, at the end of a twelve-hour workday when I’d been so behind that I didn’t get to stop to eat."
"I don’t remember what it felt like to be that cold. Isn’t that crazy? I can’t imagine what it felt like."
"Persistence is what kept me alive all winter. And persistence will win the war."
"I am so lonesome. I thought I’d want to forget last winter’s hell, but now I am in a panic in case I do forget."
"I don’t remember being scared any more at that point. I was just sick of standing there and desperate for a glass of water."
"It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t sabotage. It wasn’t my conscience nagging at me. It wasn’t anything noble."
"Silver bark of beech, and sallow / Bark of yellow birch and yellow / Twig of willow."
"Stripe of green in moosewood maple, / Colour seen in leaf of apple, / Bark of popple."
"Wood of popple pale as moonbeam, / Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam, / Wood of hornbeam."
"If I grow bitterly, / Like a gnarled and stunted tree, / Bearing harshly of my youth / Puckered fruit that sears the mouth."
"It is that a wind too strong / Bent my back when I was young, / It is that I fear the rain / Lest it blister me again."
"Her suitcases are full. But after all / she leaves them standing lifeless in the hall / and takes the cello – for its golden voice / sings back to life her murdered love and boys."
"The piercing whistle tells the tracks are clear. / She strains to glimpse the plume of steam draw near / and sees the uniforms, a distant gun / aimed at her breast. The cello cannot run."
"She pulls it to her heart, fearing the worst, / still praying for the train to reach them first."
"Run NOW. In the dark – get up and run now. Dare / the charged barbed wire NOW. No one sees or cares."
"No penny candy so stubbornly sweet / as plops of red sugar adorning my feet – / strawberry, cinnamon, / redcurrant, cranberry, / peppermint, sugarbeet, / grenadine, raspberry, / cherry and mulberry – / come look at Rose / and join in the feast / of my lollipop toes!"
"Evening is come, the board is spread – Thanks be to God, who gives us bread. Praise God for bread!"
"Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing."
"People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up."
"I have worked pretty hard over the past year and a half to keep my life in balance."
"But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up."
"Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight."
"I didn’t want to have to stand up in front of all those men, all those strangers, and have that dry little man point with his stick and explain it all in words I’ll never make sense of."
"I have scars that show and scars that don’t. Even when you’re flying high and steady, the weight doesn’t go away – it’s just balanced by lift."
"I held on to her tightly while she calmed down a little."
"The wily Ravensbrück prisoner in me rose to the surface."
"Ravensbrück doesn’t define me. I had a lot of ‘being Rose’ to cling to when I landed there."
"Words cannot describe how strange it seemed."
"Things don’t magically take off and fly just because it’s a little windy."
"What I’d really like to pound into the reader’s head, if there’s any lesson to be learned here, is that I didn’t make up Ravensbrück."
"Memories become fixed or simplified or distorted as they are told over and over, making living testimony inaccurate."
"Each of my main characters is inspired in part by real people, but they are original characters."
"Writing out Rose’s handwriting sample made me cry. It was the first time I had ever really thought about the Declaration of Independence and what it means to say that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights."
"Hope sails and plunges, firmly caught at the end of her string – fallen slack, pulling taut, ragged and featherless."