The Lost Wife Quotes
"I have lost count of the exact amount of children I have delivered."
"We wore that grief like one wears one’s underclothes."
"The practice of medicine is not something to be taken lightly."
"Being a doctor is not just a profession; it is an honor."
"I imagined myself as El Greco, arranging my father in the large recess of his intricately carved chair."
"My love for my children was so intense that it occasionally triggered something approaching panic."
"Every name I recorded was as meaningful to me as the first."
"Our skin was nothing more than a tarpaulin that stretched over an extremely efficient machine."
"I closed my eyes and colored my mental canvas with strokes of red and orange."
"Is this what a kiss from the man you love feels like? All fire and heat. The color of purple. Indigo. The blue red in our veins before it meets the air."
"The hunger. That desire to eat both the flesh and the core of the fruit. To want to lick every ounce of the juice from my fingers."
"There is nothing indecent about swimming in our underclothes."
"Stars belong in the sky, dear. Remember that."
"We’ll go shopping in New York soon. You’ll be wearing a new red dress and shoes with silk ribbons."
"I tried to remain as positive as I could, although at times it seemed almost impossible to be happy."
"Everything is so rushed... I want to be mad at my father and Josef, but there doesn’t even seem like there’s time for that."
"One doesn’t abandon family. One doesn’t leave them, even in the name of love."
"I can still see the glassiness of his eyes. Staring at me. Holding my wrist."
"Remember as a Jew there is always some sadness, even on your happiest day."
"There were two sensations of skin you will always remember in your lifetime: the first time you fall in love—and that person holds your hand—and the first time your child grasps your finger."
"Let me bring that little bit of you with me," he said.
"My family and I said good-bye to the people we had befriended over the course of our few days in the Schleusse, and began to make our way deeper into the ghetto."
"If we have, it will be the first time," I answered her.
"Education?" he asked me. I stood in front of a desk at the office of the Council of Elders, and nervously informed the man with the gray-stubbled head that I had been a student at the Art Academy in Prague.
"The barracks was a crowded place, teeming with restless, hungry women whose misery and agitation seemed to increase with each passing day."
"The thought that she felt the need to apologize to us still makes me want to cry."
"When I sat in front of that white rectangle of paper, paintbrush in hand, I could select the composition, the colors, and the lines I chose to draw."
"I was so proud of my mother that evening. She was standing in a dark basement, her students’ drawings tacked on the walls, in the same simple dress she had worn the afternoon of our transport."
"I’m tired, but I’m better than so many others here."
"I could see the ligaments under her skin, her collarbone protruding in such high relief that it reminded me of a scythe."
"I felt there was little more that could be taken from me."
"I pray you received my last letter telling you I was rescued off the coast of Ireland. The people in the village where we were taken were so kind."
"My only solace is in knowing that you are safe. I pray our child is growing and is healthy."
"I try to force myself to remember the sound of your laughter, that giggle as I playfully lay her down on the bed."
"I torture myself sometimes by conjuring up the weight of Lenka in my arms."
"The irony was not lost on anyone. Every singer who performed in the requiem was singing a mass for his or her own death."
"To those who believe the dead do not visit them, I say you have cataracts in your soul."
"And so, when the dead come to visit me, I don’t bother to try to close my eyes. I sit up and invite them in."
"I can see her arms reaching for me, sliding around my shoulders, her fingers clasping behind my neck."
"You are all brave for joining me," he told them. "Yes, we are Jews singing a Catholic text."
"I have no address to post this letter to. But I am writing it anyway because it is the only way I can say good-bye."
"Every morning when I awaken and every evening when I bed down, I wonder if you are alive and if we have had a child together."
"I told her I don’t believe her. 'It’s true,' she says as she pulls me farther on. 'We are all going to die.'"
"I fell asleep that night, exhausted. Dreaming of my friend’s mural. Wishing that all of this were nothing more than a fairy tale."
"I hold this rosary in my head, each bead with a color all its own."
"To this day, I cannot look at a pile of heaping laundry in my house."
"For every piece of gold I unstitched from the cloth, one of those cries is stitched into me."
"I would rather they shoot me than give them any of this!"
"How could I not work like that, when I heard the screams of the most recent transport passengers."
"Our fingers learned to work nimbly, to feel the hem of a skirt, not for the precision of the stitches, but with the questing touch of a blind person feeling the letters of a book in Braille."
"My heart was thicker with my second love. It had a casing around it and I wonder what else it shut out over the years."
"The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in between our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas."
"When I held my daughter in my arms and saw my reflection in her blue eyes, I felt a more overwhelming sense of emotion than I’d ever felt before."
"Like a slip of mourning hidden beneath my clothes, sewn to my skin."