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Love & Treasure QUOTES

Love & Treasure QUOTES

1 " In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished. "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

2 " How many people will die, have died, because of the wasted talents of intelligent and gifted women, forced into domestic drudgery, corseted by paternal demands, strangled by denial of opportunity? "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

3 " Or the people they call terrorists. If it’s you who’s in the foreign country, and the people you’re waiting for arguably have more of a right to be there than you do, who’s the terrorist? "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

4 " Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis. "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

5 " People never bothered to pay attention to those who served them. Waiters and drivers were the most invisible people in the world. "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

6 " The more furious he became at the perverse machinery of the military, the more his belt buckle gleamed, as if to prove that it wasn’t he who was unfit for the service but the service that was unfit for him. When "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure

7 " Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlos in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to he realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions. "

― Ayelet Waldman , Love & Treasure