Tamar Quotes

“You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“What I'm trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid".”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Thank God in an atheist.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.

At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he'd built around her, and there wasn't a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn't looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he'd guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He'd wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, "Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch is some more, or go back to bed?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It's as real as any of his other names.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“But when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn't care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn't want an ending, didn't want to get to the full stop of our story.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different ways, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them back together in a variety of shapes, like Legos. I stopped being scared of them.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.' He moved his fingers gently on my temples. 'It's to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“I'm so angry,' she said. 'I was all right until you came back. I'd given up. So many terrible things. Relatives, neighbors disappearing. Opa. The bloody Germans coming to...to strip us bare. Oma's silence. Bam, bam, bam. Like being punched over and over again. You get numb. It doesn't hurt anymore. Unless you start to hope. That's the trick, you see: you can take anything unless you start to hope.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“I felt suddenly let down. Not depressed, exactly. I can only describe it as that feeling you get when you have to go back to school after a perfect holiday. Reality tugging at you, like a friend you don't really like.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“He didn't respond for several seconds. Then he said, "You see things... sometimes you see things that make you think the rest of your life is impossible. Just seeing them damages you so much, you think, I cannot go on being human."
Marijke wrapped her fingers over his clenched fist. He didn't look at her.
"I keep thinking about the Germans in the firing squad. Killing and then killing again and again, looking at the faces... How? How did they do that? I can't... I can't even imagine. But, the thing is, if you took one of those men and stripped away the uniform, and sat him next to me, how different would we be? Would you be able to see murder on his skin? Smell murder on his breath? And not on mine?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“In London, I was unique. But down here, where I was a bungalow one minute and a funeral parlour the next, I felt as thought I was dissolving. I mean, if you're everywhere, you're nowhere. If you're everything, you're nothing.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“The thing about the Nazis," Ruud said, "is that they're paranoid, but they never see what's right under their noses. If they did, Hitler wouldn't wear that bloody silly little moustache.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“If you weren't here and Oma died, I'd deal with it. Because there'd be nothing more to lose. It'd be just me. But now it's different; it's worse. Because you're yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you'll come back. It's unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can't stand it.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar