The Leaves Are Falling Quotes

“Are we going to get out of here, do you think?” “Oh, they’ll have to release us sooner or later. Prisoners of war, which is how they must be classifying us, have to be released at the end of hostilities. There are international rules. I was a prisoner of war before, nearly forty years ago.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“Halperin thought of Zarubin’s picture of the beach and the tide of history about to destroy them all, the former people.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“Lying as a way of life is a dangerous game”, the Pole went on. “And not just because you risk the vengeance of the NKVD. You risk the integrity, the coherence, of your own soul. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, professional naval officers, who thought they could work for Lenin and then for Stalin—Russia is Russia after all—and hold on to their own truth while knowing that the politburo is a gang of murderers, except perhaps for a few idealists whom Stalin has killed, and while knowing what happened to contemporaries of ours because they were the sons of landowners or spoke French or were caught wearing a holy medal. What happened to many of these officers was a sentence to exile in Siberia with no right of correspondence—meaning death.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“Lying as a way of life is a dangerous game”, the Pole went on. “And not just because you risk the vengeance of the NKVD. You risk the integrity, the coherence, of your own soul.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“He shut his eyes. “What an idiot I was up there. Stupid, naïve . . . and slow, slow, slow to understand.” “Honest, perhaps?” Dobrowski said. Halperin was angry, but not with Dobrowski. “Isn’t honesty in a situation like that plain stupidity? I could have lied. I could have continued to lie.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“He shut his eyes. “What an idiot I was up there. Stupid, naïve . . . and slow, slow, slow to understand.” “Honest, perhaps?” Dobrowski said. Halperin was angry, but not with Dobrowski. “Isn’t honesty in a situation like that plain stupidity?”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“construction of the socialist future. No, thank you. In any case, if you”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“They decreed that rabbis were no longer to function as rabbis, that they could not teach, or decide Jewish questions in rabbinical courts, or be paid by their community. Each of them had to announce in the Yiddish press that he had ceased all rabbinical duties and that no one was to consult him about anything. This was to be the end of hundreds and hundreds of years of religious life.”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel

“Werner thought that the fact that Russia had won the war showed that history was on the side of Communism and not on the side of Nazism. So Communism must be true. To Werner, who had once believed Hitler’s stories and now believed Stalin’s stories, people one by one, their lives and their deaths, were of no account compared to the wonderful progress of history towards a heaven on earth. Could Werner see that stories of heaven and hell, happiness and punishment, used by powerful people to make others obey them—the description he had given of religion—really was a description of both Nazism and Communism?”
― Lucy Beckett, The Leaves Are Falling: A Novel