The Latecomer Quotes
"Who wouldn’t wish to spare him, and the person innocently asking the question, and, as it happened, our mother herself?"
"The shock. The glare of disapproval. The horror of it all."
"Who could explain the mystery? Who could make comprehensible the loss?"
"Certainly he was well aware of the mythic Jud Süss—"court Jew" to the Duke of Wurttemberg in the 1730s, convicted of a bouquet of fictional crimes when his boss died suddenly, and executed, his corpse hung in a gibbet for six years outside of Stuttgart—but that all felt so very eighteenth century, and Salo was a young man fresh out of the 1960s, when the entire culture had coalesced around his own generation’s youth and vigor and renunciation of the past."
"Later, the instability of those 1970s Jeeps would become something of a cliché, but at that time the notion of a rugged, gritty 4x4 driving machine, suggestive of the Manifest Destiny frontier, was one of capability, not compromise."
"The notion of a perfectly all-American anti-Semite Henry Ford."
"It was as if the hand of God itself had picked up that vehicle and dropped it back to earth."
"He sat in the second row at his girlfriend’s funeral service, four stitches in his scalp and an Ace bandage (not even a cast!) on his left wrist, out of his mind with shock and guilt, barely taking in the stream of Mandy’s cousins and high school friends."
"It was not precisely true that she made him wish to be a better man; it was more true that she made him wish he wished to be a better man."
"This was a position she had taken seriously, leaving surprise gift baskets (bagels and cream cheese, chocolate-chip cookies) on the doorstep of the Hirsch home when she knew Johanna was studying for a test."
"The identity of the young man with the bandaged wrist had been freely exchanged among them, and it would be fair to say that Salo Oppenheimer was the object of a certain romantic fascination."
"Our mother wasn’t remarkable like Mandy Bernstein. She was an ordinary girl from a family so average and undistinguished that she cringed at their inadequacies and then again at her own disloyalty."
"Her father was an accountant who worked for the famous Lawrenceville boarding school, a job he’d taken so that Johanna’s younger brother, our uncle Bobby, might possibly be granted admission."
"Johanna was an average student, a volleyball team member who mainly sat and watched, and a non-mixer in either of the two cliques that dominated her high school."
"Johanna, making a rare visit at around this time, was relieved to see Dylan Study II in its new home, but the office as a whole looked a little dingy."
"Then, one evening as she neared the Holy Grail of her eighth month, Salo set the tray down on the bed beside his mountainous wife and announced that he had purchased a warehouse in some distant wasteland of their adopted borough, and he would be moving every one of his paintings out of the house."
"Red Hook in 1982 was a neighborhood that could not imagine itself becoming anything but what it was: industrial and remote and rudely bisected from the rest of the borough by that massive swath of public housing."
"He didn’t seem to want any of it. But what did he want, instead?"
"They were so unlike the gilded and upholstered apartment of his childhood... these humble buildings promised no great comfort or beauty, and yet they called to him."
"That they were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. That they were five humans cohabiting. That they were not, and never had been, a family."
"I sometimes think it was all harder on them than on me."
"You can’t just move a painting into an old building and leave it there."
"The triplets, by this point, had reached the precipice of Walden Upper, home of the legendary Walden creativity and scholarship."
"It’s what you wanted them to do. Except that her departing children would leave nothing behind."
"Every Walden student would be treated as the unique and capable young adult he or she was."
"If anything, she regarded the annual bill as a kind of superstitious rite to be observed."
"It was a speck in liquid ice in a building somewhere in Connecticut."
"The notion that something had actually happened in this backwoods wilderness which was of critical interest to millions of people around the world would come as something of a shock."
"No, what I object to is the fact that you young students are in a position of privilege, with all human knowledge at your fingertips, and yet you are paralyzed by guilt over the moral failings of people who died centuries before you were born."
"This was the flaw in making a bargain with yourself. There is no one else there to agree to the terms."
"But even as he conjured this bit of defensiveness he realized that he didn’t know anything about Mormons, certainly not enough to conceive of something that might warrant prejudice."
"He did not have a roommate, as such, since 'the men'—Christ—all roomed together in what sounded like a bunkhouse."
"Every Passover should call us to social justice."
"When one of us is still enslaved, no one is really free."
"Principles weren't paramount, but they are. They always are."
"You could give one of your own, if that interested you."
"We specialize in disagreeing about what things really mean."
"The political is personal, so take it personally and do something about it."
"We are all strangers in a strange land. All away from home, so we try to make it fun."
"We who have accepted your son Jesus Christ as our personal savior live in the certainty of your eternal kingdom."
"It wasn't compassion for the bird, or belief in the sanctity of its life; it was the filth and the crap and the flying feathers and the smells and the sounds."
"This stuff represents the mortar the slaves had to make in Egypt. Also the sweetness of life."
"You don’t hold on to Shaker just ’cause it’s pretty."
"I’m not sentimental. I’d sell it if there was anyone to buy it, but nobody wants this stuff now."
"When it became clear that debate and argument were just so much treading of mud, the systems themselves began to break down."
"I’ve generally talked about education, my experience as a self-schooled student."
"I feel as if I should have given you some warning before I brought my concerns about Carlos to the attention of the community."
"The damage crept steadily outward, ensnaring them all."
"It’s not a formal thing. Everyone who attends can speak on any topic they like."
"He declined to show his hand, and he never, ever broke."
"The Seder reminds us that the political is personal, so take it personally and do something about it."
"She was so little, she barely rose above their very blond heads."
"He felt himself get hot, as if someone had turned a knob at his ankle and the flame climbed upward."
"He was thinking of his brother Lewyn, and his sister Sally—how they would have writhed and scoffed at such a notion."
"The world had divided into a small circle of time and space within which the two of them abided, outside of which was, simply, everyone and everything else."
"Learning things was the whole point of being alive."
"He loved everything about this place, and what was happening to him here."
"I didn’t slaughter any Native Americans. I’m not burning any witches or lynching somebody because I don’t like the way they looked at my wife."
"He wanted to tell them something he was better equipped to tell than anyone else in the room."
"How are we supposed to get up on our feet and actually accomplish anything? It’s absurd!"
"It was deep green, and it all got quiet once they entered the trees."
"People dispersed along a web of paths, as if they knew where to go, which frustrated Lewyn more and more with each turn he took."
"He wasn’t warm and he wasn’t cold. The ground underfoot was soft."
"‘You can’t find it if you don’t know you’re in it,’ the man said, not unkindly."
"‘Oh I know,’ Rochelle said tersely. ‘But not for this.’"
"‘Freedom of speech at its finest,’ said Lewyn, trying for lightheartedness."
"It’s a beautiful thing that Heavenly Father uses his gift of art to sustain our faith."
"‘I mean, people spend years keeping their heads down, working really hard so they can get into an Ivy League school...'"
"‘Well, it’s not desirable,’ our mother said tersely, ‘but these aren’t things you leave to chance. You can’t do that with a baby. You have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.'"
"You have to feel for the guy. I feel for the guy. If Joseph Oppenheimer had agreed to convert to Christianity he’d have been home by dinnertime."
"‘Not that it matters,’ Harrison tried one last time before the final turn to the house. ‘Obviously,’ Lewyn parried. ‘Except, you know, to our sister.’"
"There aren’t that many people who do what we do, and actually like it."
"Sometimes I feel like they’re my excuse to go in there and empty out the houses."
"Making a space habitable for human beings, all good for the planet as far as I’m concerned."
"The world’s caught up to a lot of those painters, too."
"I’ve always thought, good thing it wasn’t drugs. I’d be dead."
"Everything is important, since I can’t remember him on my own."
"A lot of intractable issues suddenly become very pliable when people start telling other people they love them."
"We all had an awful fight... And that was our nineteenth birthday, all of us screaming and stomping off."
"The person who knows the most wins. Not necessarily the smartest. The one who knows the most."
"It was the passion. The love and the passion, all over the walls out here."
"This debate ranged in substance from deeply unpleasant comments about Shaunta Owens’s "Black accent" to the usual praise for Eli Absalom Stone and his great, self-reliant rise."
"The real racism is the assumption that some ethnicities need a leg up."
"I’m not sure. I was trying to be open to the possibility."
"It might have been the most important thing I told him."
"I felt terrible. It was the worst I’d felt all that year, which was saying something."
"I told him I knew about Stella. It was the last night of his life, and I basically left him with: you’re a terrible father."
"There’s absolutely an environmental element. Some houses get toxic."
"It wasn’t like now... There wasn’t an ‘online,’ really, except for chat groups and stuff on AOL."
"It was thrilling to find some article that might conceivably be personal."
"It's good for you to have these memories. You're excavating them. Literally. And they belong to you."
"Self-invention is a thoroughly American virtue. It always has been."
"I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘That man is not Black.’"
"But if he was my friend, I’d be deeply discouraged and confused to find that I’d been lied to about so many things for such a long time."
"I think you were wrong about that. I think you were born at the exact right time."
"I don’t think any of them really spoke for years afterward, beyond the absolutely necessary."
"I’m not sure the others got it either, and they deserved it just as much."
"It’s just fun. ‘Stitch and Bitch,’ they call it."
"I seem to have gotten past it. I wonder when that happened."
"You’re not some random person we were all saddled with, you know."