People Of The Book Quotes
"I MIGHT AS WELL SAY, right from the jump: it wasn’t my usual kind of job."
"To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history."
"No conservator had handled this manuscript for a century."
"Books do best when temperature, humidity, the whole environment, stay the same."
"But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past."
"By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book."
"And then I realized I’d worked right through the day without a break."
"I’m not big on wringing out other people’s soggy hankies, and if I wanted a partner, I’d join a law firm."
"WHEN YOU HAVE WORKED WELL, there should be no sign that you have worked at all."
"The tempo of departures picked up as the news from Germany worsened."
"They are just louts. Every community has its louts, even ours. It doesn’t mean anything."
"I wonder if you…if you…would give me your jackets and trousers?"
"We wouldn’t be able to last five minutes out here without their support."
"Your life is not yours. Every extra day you are given belongs to those of your families who have died."
"She looked tired and chilled. Stela offered her a hot drink."
"The rich aroma made Lola’s mouth water."
"Stela raised the džezva high and poured the hot coffee in a long dark thread."
"But now I want you to go away from this place. Yes," she said firmly, as Lola shook her head."
"I am happy to reply to your kind inquiry by remarking that my day has been very agreeable."
"He had no patience for this time-wasting stream of pleasantries."
"He was thirty-six years old, father of two attractive children, married to a woman he still admired, discreetly entertained by a series of mistresses who amused him."
"The city had been confident enough to raze its own medieval fortress walls and replace them with the welcoming new sweep of the Ringstrasse."
"The city pulsed with the frantic energy of its own great invention, the waltz."
"Discretion: a valuable commodity in this city, capital of carnality, where scandal and gossip were the fuels that stoked the social engine."
"Six years since the crown prince and his paramour had done away with themselves in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, and still one never tired of new rumors regarding that tragedy, or farce, depending on one’s degree of romanticism or cynicism."
"Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted with some flourish."
"You asked for my opinion. Now you have it."
"Not everyone who wishes to set up as a printer should be approbated to do so."
"A man's worth does not come from what he wears on his head."
"You are a fountain of clear water where the parched may drink."
"I do not need to know anything more than that they are Jews, they are in need, and you think them worthy of my help."
"I have discovered that I cannot live my whole life as a lie."
"I would have been a different person if I’d had this family."
"It wasn’t enough to know that she had once been a woman capable of a great love."
"He needn’t have risked his life with a dangerous operation. He had so much. A lover, a family. A child on the way. But none of it was as important to him as his work."
"But she found out where you went to pre-school, you know, and would go there and watch for you, in the afternoon, when the housekeeper came to collect you. She worried about you. She said you looked like a sad little kid…."
"He walked into my surgery, and I just knew—"
"But even in first class, airline food is crap."
"You were right: NaCl. But sea, not rock."
"Thousands of feet below, the salty waves of an unseen ocean heaved and crashed in the dark."
"The word of YHVH is refined as silver and gold are refined."
"But perhaps that was not it at all. Perhaps it was merely a beam of thin winter sunlight, glinting on gold."
"It is Jewish money—or at least Jewish money raising—that has secured them the victory over the Moors!"
"Whomever is in need, let him enter and celebrate."
"Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad."
"I always find myself lapsing into Paleolithic Strine when I’m around them."
"It’s somehow ominous and innocent at the same time."
"I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book."
"I start losing the t out of water and plopping down a d instead."
"Check it out!!! Is the Frau wearing part of our missing clasp???"
"The rain in London isn’t like the stuff in Sydney."
"I’m terribly sorry I can’t invite you in."
"The cuticle scales are prototypically sharp and pointed."
"My eyes seep sorrow; water skins with holes."
"Into one grain, there come a hundred harvests."
"The angels enter not into a house where there is a dog or a likeness."
"I saw myself, walking to the coast. The great sea would part, and I would cross it."
"State-of-the-art sensors scribbled out lines that tracked temperature and humidity."
"Each piece had something in common with the haggadah—similar materials or a related artistic style."
"The floor seemed to drop away from under my feet."
"There’s nothing wrong…nothing wrong with the room."
"I just realized I forgot to make a necessary correction."
"My dear Dr. Heath, the catalogs are printed already. Any corrections—"
"I believe he is in the library; shall I send for him?"
"It’s nonsense. The haggadah is locked in the vitrine. I secured it there myself."
"What they’ve used, the pore holes, they’re all wrong…the size, the scatter…it’s parchment made from a different breed…."
"I’m relieved to say I can’t agree with you, my dear."
"You will be sowing intercommunal dissent over the very artifact that was meant to stand for the survival of our multiethnic ideal."
"The best place to hide a book might be in a library."
"I wake early these days. I think it’s the cold that wakes me, stirring up the ache in my bones."
"Cleaning those rooms is, for me, a privilege."
"It’s a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones."
"I fashioned these pictures for Binyamin ben Netanel ha-Levi."
"I risked my life to save that book. If you are suggesting…"
"But at least books have something to do with culture."
"I didn’t have gloves, forms. I had no business touching it. But I had to be sure."
"I’m thinking that if I could have one wish, this would be the last book ever to be burned in my city."