The Storyteller Quotes
"The moral conundrum in which Wiesenthal found himself has been the starting point for many philosophical and moral analyses."
"To undertake a novel grounded in one of the most horrible crimes against humanity in history is a daunting task."
"The trouble started on my eighteenth birthday."
"Ignore him. He is a little man who casts a big shadow."
"Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion."
"That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?"
"I grew up thinking of loss as a positive outcome."
"The scar is silver now, ruched, rippling my cheek and my brow like the neck of a silk purse."
"It isn’t even a scar to me, really. It’s a map of where my life went wrong."
"Sometimes good people do bad things."
"Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other."
"Desperate people often do things that they normally would not do."
"If you don’t know where you’ve come from, how in Heaven’s name will you ever figure out where you’re going?"
"Everyone always asks: How could Nazis come to power? How could Hitler have had such free rein? Well, I tell you: desperate people often do things that they normally would not do."
"The biggest mistake people make when they think about Nazi war criminals is to assume they were always monsters; before, during, and after the war. They weren’t."
"I don’t know how to stop. We’ll run checks in two Berlin records centers and our own databases. But the bottom line is if there’s no valid information to run with—"
"It’s human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind."
"The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany. So why not try this?"
"Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy."
"We Germans needed Lebensraum—living space—to be a great nation. Without room to expand, there was little choice: you went to war to conquer territory and you got rid of the people who were a threat to Germany, or who weren’t ethnic Germans like you."
"Of course, convincing myself and others that I was a good man, an honest man, a humble teacher was easy."
"If you keep telling yourself you are a certain kind of person, eventually you will become that person."
"To be stripped naked, shouted at to move faster and faster toward the pit with your children running beside you."
"I had done it because I knew I was strong where my brother was weak."
"Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to."
"Maybe it’s not so much about catching the perpetrators, after sixty-five years. Maybe it’s just so that he knows someone is still listening, for the sake of the victims."
"It is amazing, what you can make yourself believe, when you have to."
"I could have said no. Every time after that, it became easier, because if I didn’t do it again, I would be reminded of that first time I did not say no."
"That day was the hardest, because I could have said no. Every time after that, it became easier."
"But you can keep dividing and dividing and you’ll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no."
"What is bad is harmful, we were told. What is good is useful. It truly was that simple."
"No matter how many people are telling you to jump off a bridge, you always have the option to turn around and walk away."
"The reason I am still sitting at Josef’s kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck—you want to see the damage; you can’t let yourself pass without that mental snapshot."
"I don’t know how you sleep at night," I reply. "Who says that I do?" Josef answers.
"We believe what we want to, what we need to."
"Isn't that a little Old Testament for a nun?"
"Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal."
"You don’t make peace only with God. You make it with people."
"I don’t want to. But there’s a part of me that says he’s just an old, frail man."
"I think of this, and even though I am not religious, I pray that she will forgive me."
"People have to experience things that terrify them."
"Family is everything to me. You are everything to me."
"I’ll leave the dancing to you," I told Darija, but it had worked; I was winded and my cheeks were pink and warm.
"The dire circumstances in which I had set my story made everyone a little bit of both."
"The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it."
"Here’s what I now knew about blood: it was brighter than you would imagine, the color of the deepest rubies, until it dried sticky and black."
"Sometimes when I was lying next to Basia and Majer at night, and they had fallen asleep, I pressed the back of my hand against my lips and wondered what it would be like to kiss him."
"My father did not comment, which made me wonder if maybe he already knew what I was trying so hard not to tell him."
"Even a baby like Majer was not a child, because he would have no memory of a life that wasn’t like this one."
"My mother cut the twine with a kitchen knife. The paper, waxy and mottled, fell away to reveal a tiny vial of medicine."
"He looked down at Majer then, and touched his finger to his lips, as if he was keeping him quiet, or pressing him a kiss."
"I remembered the way the light would slant inside at about four thirty in the summer, when the sun was beginning to slip behind the buildings across the street."
"But because when we were locking up the factory office in the dark, where no one else could see us, Herr Fassbinder had held the door open for me, as if I was still a young lady, and not just a Jew."
"You cannot blame Casimir for his death," Aleks begged. "Because I am the one who killed him."
"They can take away my home," he said. "And my money, and my wife and my child. But they can’t take away my dreams."
"If you die, it will be with a bullet to the heart, not the head. I promise."
"My father began to move to the left, with the other men. 'Papa!' I screamed, running toward him."
"Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around."
"Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent."
"There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron."
"It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind."
"The air is cool in the twilight and gently flows the Rhine."
"It was, I realized, the closest he could come to giving me his thanks."
"Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface."
"You see, this is why I never told my story. If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. And if you didn’t, you will never understand."
"Love isn’t the only word that fails. Hate does, too. War. And hope. Oh, yes, hope."
"History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them."
"There is a prayer for the sick and the healing, a sermon from the rabbi. There is a blessing over challah and wine."
"I don’t believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people."
"Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others."
"When you do not understand the language being spoken, you have two options. You can struggle against the isolation, or you can give yourself up to it."
"It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of, if you buy into the lie."
"If you really want me to forgive you for what you’ve done, you have to tell me all of it."
"I knew that the Reich was not going to last much longer now that the Americans had gotten involved."
"I could not let the girl tell my brother what she had seen. So I shot her."
"Because of what I did, my own brother betrayed me."
"Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself."
"You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me."
"The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you."
"The worst thing I ever did, Sage, was kill my own brother."
"It does not matter who forgives you, if you’re the one who can’t forget."