Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“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.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Go ahead, he said. I dare you. He exaggerated each word now now, as though teaching elocution to a foreigner. I like you, Aaron Levy-you are a decent human being after all.
Her mouth had shut. she opened She opened it, after a time, to say only only, You're a bigger fool than I thought.
That was close he said. We'll tray again sometime, okay? Don't feel bad, you almost got it”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them,”
― Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents

“What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and G-d, and between man and man--but most of all, between man and himself. It's not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain, sometimes heard only by what Rabbi Soloveitchik so movingly called the lonely man of faith”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“When your heart breaks, you can actually feel it, an agonizing stab of pain in a muscle that you know for a fact is just a glorified pump. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, the ordered universe changes, the solid ground beneath your feet becomes a slippery rock. The material world that seemed so safe and solid a moment ago becomes a shifting, ghostly place of shadows and mist. Matters that seemed settled and certain a long ago come suddenly unhinged, and you begin to doubt everything you ever knew to be true.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“...(O)ver four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation--and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell