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21 " The death of a parent, he says to it, is a profoundly lifealtering experience, isn't it? When I was a child, I often had this feeling of God's in his Heaven: All's right with the world—that's Robert Browning. An English poet. But ever since my father died in the last war, I've awakened each morning knowing that I'll never again feel that absolute security. Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off... "
― Jenna Blum , Those Who Save Us
22 " It's like being in a sort of club, isn't it? A bereavement club. You don't choose to join it; it's thrust upon you. And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren't in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high. "
23 " Kinder, Kirche, Küche: children, church, kitchen; this is what all German girls hope for; "
24 " So you see, he says softly, we are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past? "
25 " Each person has this choice to make about how to live with the past, this dignity, this inviolable right. "
26 " Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core. "
27 " You are such a young and childish country, believing that one can better understand the injuries of the past by wallowing in them and analyzing their causes. You do not know enough to understand that the only way to heal a wound is to leave it alone. To let sleeping dogs lie, as it were, rather than enthusiastically kicking them as "
28 " Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . "
29 " Kinder, Kirche, Küche: children, church, kitchen; this "
30 " She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does this is true, the word that sick in her throat was not save by shame. "
31 " world to be safe, pokes its soft head from "
32 " I would find your project offensive on the level of its naïveté. It is an offshoot of the American concept that it is somehow attractive to air one’s dirty laundry in public. It is everywhere, this ideology: your talk shows, your radio hosts encouraging people to call in and whine and gripe and pick their little scabs. You are such a young and childish country, believing that one can better understand the injuries of the past by wallowing in them and analyzing their causes. You do not know enough to understand that the only way to heal a wound is to leave it alone. To let sleeping dogs lie, as it were, rather than enthusiastically kicking them as you do. "
33 " People ostensibly turning a blind eye to their neighbors’ activities while really harvesting and analyzing every last detail of their lives. The ingredients for their dinners. The color of their underwear, purchased in the local Ben Franklin. Who is sick, who is well, who is adulterous. "
34 " Goethe’s Oak, which, "
35 " this book. It takes a village to raise a child, which is precisely what writing a novel is. If I have "
36 " Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . . . "
37 " sanguine "
38 " The American infantry, it is said, has seized control of cities as close as Eisenach and Ehrfurt, ransacking and burning the houses, raping the women, worse than the Russians. "
39 " trudging a determined circuit around Lake Harriet even in the most dismal weather. "
40 " AS IF TO COMPENSATE for the punitive winter, the city explodes with flowers overnight—making it, if only for a week or two, one of the most beautiful places on earth. "