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181 " Yet the body insists on the struggle for life. Why? "
― Rachel Kadish , The Weight of Ink
182 " What right have they to disdain a martyr? "
183 " A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safer pasture "
184 " a change of governance that could soon mean different heads lofted in punishment for the telling of different truths. She wanted to breathe the warning into all their ears: never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt. "
185 " If my words cut, then let them cut as the physick’s knife, to restore health. And let my own imperfections, numerous as grains of sand, not mar my message. "
186 " If there be any further freedom than the one granted by excommunication, perhaps it is the freedom not to exist. "
187 " My form is neither pleasing nor displeasing,” she said. “But I’ve let the world see how little I care for its verdict. "
188 " Philosophy could be severed from life. "
189 " For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied. "
190 " Don't"--she bit her lip and held it. "Don't turn your back just because it terrifies you." [...] "I don't think I'm strong enough," Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub's windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, "How do you think people get strong? "
191 " She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy. "
192 " Have you ever had to contemplate letting loved ones die at the hand of someone who hates them? "
193 " Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, "
194 " Hope against reason: an opiate she’d long abandoned. "
195 " Then must we abandon our accustomed notion of a woman’s kindness, and forge a new one. "
196 " Glimpsing the void in your souls, you will by nature wish for that which will fill it at once. It is from this wish that you must be on your guard, and discern the light of true learning from the false. "
197 " The Portuguese and Hebrew words had been finished here and there with high, distinctive arches that sloped backward over the letters they adorned: the roofs of the Portuguese letters sloping to the left, those of the occasional Hebrew verse to the right, the long unbroken lines proceeding down the page like successive rows of cresting waves approaching a shore, one after another, dizzying. "
198 " Truth-telling is a luxury for those whose lives aren’t at risk. "