Songs for the Butcher's Daughter Quotes

“...Traduttore, traditore.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“A boy with a story must write.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“Hoe bang ik ook was, ik besefte dat dit altijd het lot van een dichter zou zijn: geïsoleerd en alleen te zijn, naar antwoorden te haken, met als gezelschap slechts letters en niet-aflatende kwellingen.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“The goyim are a curious people," Malpesh once said to me, before he had discovered who and what I was. "Not curious that they want to know things," he clarified, "curious that they don't.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“Learning to pass, it turns out, is less a matter of acting than not acting. You can become part of a given scene, situation, or people ('our people,' as it were), simply by letting yourself serve as a mirror for those around you. When I was still in college, when I still thought I might make a good priest, I spent some time in a Trappist monastery. I found that by exerting as little of my own personality as possible, I was able to fit right in. The monks in no time came to call me brother, believing I was destined to make vows as one of their own. Passing begins with the assumptions of those around you. The best thing you can do to maintain the illusion is to come as close as possible to doing nothing at all.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“Hoping to apply what few marketable skills I'd acquired in school, I used my undergraduate's Hebrew to check into options in Israel. I was eager to travel, open to adventure, but as a non-Jew, I found that my possible motives were a cause for concern. In more than one interview I was asked a question that I would eventually hear word for word from Malpesh himself: Are you some sort of missionary? To my prospective employers I tried to explain that if I was to convert anyone it would only be to a nebulous wishy-washy agnosticism, but this honest answer did not earn me many callbacks.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“I had been a religion major, with a focus on scriptural languages, and upon receiving my degree, felt qualified to do--nothing.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“De weduwe kuste haar vingers en legde ze daarna tegen mijn voorhoofd.
   ‘Zet Sasja uit je hoofd,’ zei ze. ‘Leef je leven op de plek waar je bent.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

“En wat is nu de moraal van dit verhaal?’ vroeg Minkovski.
   ‘Dat een slimme Jood zich uit elke onaangename situatie weet te redden,’ zei Zinnenoff.”
― Peter Manseau, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter