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141 " For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely? "
― Rachel Kadish , The Weight of Ink
142 " Ignorance is now your great enemy, and I do none any favor by flattering you that you are not ignorant. "
143 " I gladly conspire with you, as all we men of philosophy breathe the same air of questions wheresoever we reside. "
144 " Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was. "
145 " The God the tradition spoke of must necessarily wish for the well-being of His creations. Either there was no such God, then....or perhaps there existed only a God who could do nothing to alter the world’s evils. Then did God quake in helpless fear at the roar of fire, the cry of a mob? Did God too tremble at times with the rage and confusion? "
146 " Why, when the rabbis wished to understand God’s will or Augustine the construction of man’s soul, did they not reason as Descartes did, taking nothing as given? Must true inquiry proceed from texts and traditions already established, or could the mind on its own perceive all it needed to fathom the world? And which path of inquiry led more straightly to truth? The "
147 " A beauty to tempt away a man’s better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil. "
148 " From the fireside and the kitchen, prayer and weeping. She tried to imagine dropping into grief. She pictured it, like letting go of a rope. To crumple with sorrow, fall at someone’s feet, beg mercy? But these things required belief that mercy existed in the world. She was nineteen years of age and could no longer bend her mind to believe in the comforts embraced by others. The fire had forged them both—she and her brother—into brittle instruments. Should she bend, she would break. She struck the tears away with the backs of her hands. No star remained now to navigate by. Isaac had been her last. "
149 " If a character is in a room, I ask myself: what is she noticing? What does it feel like to be in her shoes? What does this situation remind her of . . . what hopes or fears does it invoke . . . how is all of that influencing her right now—and how will it color the words she speaks next, when someone asks her an unexpected question? Once I’ve spent enough time with my characters, I’m able to begin to guess how they might respond to their circumstances. And that’s when the novel’s storyline begins to emerge. Which is to say: this novel was an act of improvisation. "
150 " And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it. "
151 " He took it between his fingers, bore down with his bruised knuckle on its ridges, and like a miner picking his way toward an unknown destination began to write—slowly, steadily, filling the void with work. Was that what sadness did to a man? "
152 " Yet though I saw myself straying ever farther from the path laid before me, I cried out then and still: why say woman may not follow her nature if it lead her to think, for must not even the meanest beast follow its nature? And why forbid woman or man from questioning what we are taught, for is not intelligence holy? The world and I have sinned against each other. "
153 " This is what you Americans do all day, is it? Sit about confessing things. What a rotten influence you are! "
154 " they were so tightly knit together that no surgery could separate them without devastating both. "
155 " Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she’d been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman’s existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture. "
156 " She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny. "
157 " I remade my heart. I learned to conduct myself in love so it could not betray me. "
158 " No, not even a line. It was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner. אהבתי An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand. The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant “I loved. "
159 " I told her: I act such that love will not fail again as it failed us before. "
160 " How readily the rules of female behavior—gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness—turned to shackles. "