The Palace at the End of the Sea Quotes

“he turned his back on the chosen people because he felt chosen himself. By whom, he couldn’t say. Not God, not Christ—it was a source of lasting sadness to Elena that her husband showed no interest in her religion. America, perhaps—Michael Sterling was not a religious man, but he had an unswerving faith in his adopted country.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Michael and Elena lived in a perfectly separated alignment like two heavenly bodies orbiting each other with an equal gravity. They loved each other with a happy superficiality, and so when conflict arose, as it had now, they lacked the tools to find resolution and instead crashed against each other until they were spent.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“They were perfectly happy with each other, but their happiness was built on a fundamental lack of connection between them. Michael knew nothing of his wife’s alternately vengeful and merciful God, who was as real to her as his factory was to him, and she had no idea of the struggle that he had gone through to climb from poverty to comparative wealth, stepping down hard on the heads and shoulders of his people to get there.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“They were perfectly happy with each other, but their happiness was built on a fundamental lack of connection between them.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“he turned his back on the chosen people because he felt chosen himself.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“It dumbfounded her, this cathedral with no God. Its grand impersonal immensity dried up what hope she had left, and she bowed her head and began to cry.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“I’m no Jew and nor is my son,” he said, spitting out the words. “We’re Americans.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Jewish blood comes from the mother, not the father. Theo’s a Catholic like his mother”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“The exploitation and the suffering are at their worst now because this Depression we’re in is the death knell of capitalism,” said Esmond, leaning forward as he warmed to his theme. “It’s like a rabid dog. It gets vicious and poisonous when it’s dying, which is why it turns into Fascism.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“It’s capitalism’s fault. Owners and workers are caught in its web. One must exploit the other—that is essential to their relationship—and so they become alienated not just from each other but from their own humanity.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“crashed down upon the empty shore and was gone.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Theo glimpsed him, wild-eyed on the horse in Steeplechase Park, his shoulders arched forward and his hair streaming back as he rose and fell with the rails, and he saw the child in the man, too, with all the driving force and energy that had taken him up and up like a magnificent ocean wave until it”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“I hate that the Church is so political and takes the side of the rich against the poor.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Mosley’s a clown running a one-man circus,” Sir Andrew said contemptuously. “He’ll be forgotten by Christmas.” “Isn’t that what they said about Hitler?”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“European ghettos are pouring their dregs into our great country. The dregs of humanity—you know who I am referring to!”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Theo realized that this was a man in love with the sound of his own voice.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Because the persecution is still going on, you know. In Germany, Hitler is taking away their rights, shipping them off to concentration camps. There’s one near Munich called Dachau where they’re worked and starved to death. The SS beat them with clubs and hang them from iron posts if they try to resist.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Those are all lies, filthy lies,” he spluttered angrily. “Yes, that’s what Stalin says too,” Father Laurence continued smoothly on. “‘Lies, lies!’ he sneers, but he is the one who is lying, and on a scale that no one before now could ever have imagined, because he’s realized that the more colossal the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. No ruler could sell grain when his people are starving, and so they can’t be starving. It’s as simple as that. And so the peasants carry on dying without their deaths even being acknowledged. The shameless audacity of the performance is truly diabolical.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Hitler needs someone to blame, and the Jew is his scapegoat. The persecution will get worse soon, much worse, and your blood will tell you that you cannot stand aside and do nothing.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Capitalists aren’t fools. They wouldn’t be rich if they were, and they understand that they need to control education to keep power.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“changed,”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“He had no intention or indeed capacity to simply forget his adventure as his father had instructed, but he also had a deep wish to keep what had happened to himself, to hug the experience close and keep it a secret.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“Among the recordings were some of the Dixieland jazz hits that Theo remembered blaring out from the doorways of the Fourteenth Street dime stores in New York. The strutting rhythm of the trumpets and clarinets made Theo homesick, and he felt the connection to his childhood in the aching, time-jumping way that sound and smell can provide, but the remembering mind, laboring in the abstract, can never attain.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“rise of totalitarianism abroad. Now, once again, the Western democracies face the challenge of a Fascist power launching a barbaric war of aggression and must decide whether to go down the road of appeasement or resistance. Now, more than ever, is the time for us to learn from our history.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“aching, time-jumping way that sound and smell can provide, but the remembering mind, laboring in the abstract, can never attain.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea

“(but) for many in the city, the name Hoover had become a term of abuse. Hoover blankets were the sheets of old newspapers that the homeless wrapped themselves in to keep warm, Hoover leather was the cardboard they used to cover the holes in the soles of their shoes, and Hoover flags were their empty pants pockets turned inside out— the visible proof of their destitution as they held out their hands for alms. And at night they slept in Hoovervilles— shantytowns made of cardboard, tin, and scraps of broken wood.”
― Simon Tolkien, The Palace at the End of the Sea