Rob

“She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“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

“How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself...and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Esther now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body - and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.” The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink