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troubadour.
patisserie
“Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.”
She’d learned a long time ago that if you faked confidence well enough, other people would start believing you knew what you were doing.
dishabille
It had been a private thing, sacred and wonderful, and unimaginable to so many who thought only within the narrow boundaries of romantic love. Now, she was lonely with the knowledge. No one prepared you for that, the way once-delicious secrets shared between you soured when they became yours alone to bear.
Girls were taught how to catch boys, not how to protect themselves from them.
The way to judge people wasn’t to look at how they acted toward people they wanted to impress; it was to look at the way they treated those who could do nothing for them.
“Life isn’t a fairy tale,”
“Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. And most people are just trying to survive.”
words cannot be unwritten simply because you burn them. Ideas cannot simply be erased. People cannot be erased.”
“Burning books about things you do not like or understand does not mean those things no longer exist.”
“Favorite book,” the librarian repeated, as she situated herself on the stool. “I think that’s like picking a favorite moment in your life. Perhaps you could name one but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a hundred others nearly as worthy.”
The time and distance that came with history had a way of letting people forget.
What can we do? Hannah had asked him, sure the answer would be Nothing. Something, anything, he’d said. It is not failure we should fear but inaction.
May his memory be a blessing, Brigitte had said. In Jewish tradition, that meant it was the responsibility of those who remembered the deceased to carry on his goodness.
“No.” Edith shook her head. “But the whole thing was rather grim. No fairy-tale ending, no knight coming in to save the day. It was . . .” She paused. “Brutal. Aching, even. A lesson about good fights and the ways that they are often lost anyway.”
Althea might not have studied literature at a fancy college, but she was skilled enough to know how to craft a compelling villain. No character was ever completely good or evil, but rather they were made up of a number of traits. Those traits plus the choices they made defined what role they played in the story. A hero could be stubborn and use that to defend his homeland. A villain could be stubborn and because of that refuse to see that his views were immoral. Only few traits were inherently bad. Cowardice had to be one of them.
Even in the darkest days, in their deepest grief, at their most exhausted, humans found a way to create moments that were so fundamentally hopeful that they couldn’t help but inspire you to take one more step forward. And then one more.
She had believed in the basic goodness of people, that most were just trying to do their best in a world that could sometimes be hard. She had been open and kind and sarcastic, a good friend and a good sister.
They were different from each other in all the right ways, and the same in the places that mattered.
There were moments like these in life, presenting themselves sometimes rarely, where you could hold on to grudges, burn relationships to the ground, salt the earth, and only look back to seethe in anger. Or you could acknowledge that people made mistakes, were flawed, and deserved second chances. Especially when those choices had been made when they were young and hurting from their own deep-seated pain.
“The good fight isn’t always about winning. Sometimes it’s a reminder to the world that there are people out there who are willing to try.”
The Hannah of now would never have allowed that to come to pass. But it hadn’t felt completely real at the time. Hitler had been installed as chancellor because the moderates had thought they could control him. Most people who paid attention to politics in those days expected him to fade into obscurity, his madness burning bright but then snuffing out quickly.
We . . . we humans, we love telling each other stories, don’t we? We’ve done just that in caves and in amphitheaters and in the Globe and in kitchens and around campfires and in the trenches. Every culture, every country, every type of person in the world tells stories. They’ve been whispered and sung and written down on scraps of paper and they have always, always been an indelible part of our very humanity.”
“Few people have to watch their country die,” Hannah said, her lyrical voice all the more captivating because she spoke softly. Althea found herself leaning toward her, and she imagined the rest of the audience was no different. “I have had that dubious privilege, and I can tell you that it comes not as a rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious as anything I’ve ever seen. It can start with rumblings about an unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will threaten your family, your children. It can deepen with each disdainful remark about science and art
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The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.”
history is built on moments that feel insignificant.
denouement
