The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

“Can a person not be two things at once?”

Later, as I got to know her, I’d realize that when she gardens, she never sees the seed. She is already picturing the plant it will become. I imagine she thought the same, meeting me.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

the stories of survivors I’ve interviewed, who can describe the stench from the chimneys of the crematoria: nauseating and acrid and sulfurous, fatty and thick, almost more of a taste than a smell. They say you couldn’t help but breathe it in, everywhere you went. That even now, they sometimes wake up with the scent of burning flesh in their nostrils.

It is amazing, I realize, how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.

You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to to believe the best about someone if you truly love him,”

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope.

You cannot feed others if you are always hungry,

“Do we grieve because the person we lost was such a light in the world? Or do we grieve because of who he was to us?”

I could see the man he used to be: the one buried beneath the kindly exterior for so many decades, like a root growing slow beneath pavement, still capable of cracking concrete.

“I’m surprised you can believe in God, after meeting so many evil people.” “How could I not,” Leo asks, “after meeting so many survivors?”

My book was taking a turn, now that I had been relocated to the ghetto. Suddenly, the charming little village I had created was more sinister—a prison.

Here’s what I now knew about blood: it was brighter than you would imagine, the color of the deepest rubies, until it dried sticky and black. It smelled like sugar and metal. It was impossible to get out of your clothes.

Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love—well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase—not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been—what would you take?

Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?

I do not know when I started thinking of the mass extermination at this camp as being humane—thinking like the Germans, I supposed—but if the alternative was to waste away to a corpse, as my mind shut down by degrees due to starvation, well, then, maybe it was best to just get this over with.

“You can put a pig in a ball gown, Minka. That doesn’t make it a debutante.”

For the first time, I thought that maybe Basia was right, since she had been spared the horrors of a place like this. If you knew you were going to die, wasn’t it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil? What if Basia’s act wasn’t one of desperation but a final moment of self-control?

You can tell yourself that it’s safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can’t lose someone you never had.

I just don’t understand how I can miss something I barely even had.