Dinner at the Center of the Earth Quotes

“You rented an apartment with its own escape route?” “I did,” Z says. “It’s not so paranoid when you use it to do just that.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“If Z had only known in his perfectly lovely two rooms in Paris what he'd come to know in his single 6x8 block somewhere, he guessed, just outside Tel Aviv. If he'd had an inkling in that breezy French apartment of what true boredom felt like and true loneliness, and true limbo - what it might actually be like to be locked up, hidden away without hope. If he'd tasted real madness at that point, he'd not have decided that he was so bored and so crazy that, without TV or Radio or a suitably advanced French, that, at the very least, he deserved a taste of the night air and something decent to read, and maybe, if the shop was still open, a decent bottle of wine.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“There is only one thing I can guess in a house with no personal details of any kind, and a man who tells me only stories from when he was young. You're a spy? Yes?'
'Sort of,' is Z's unsatisfactory answer.
'Sort of?'
'The term. It really gets misused.' And trying to appease her, Z says, 'I mean, colloquially.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“And once the invasion begins? There’s no knowing how and when, or even if, the bloodshed will ever end. Only that both sides will battle for justice, killing each other in the name of those freshly killed, honoring the men who died avenging those who, before them, died avenging.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“This time, as with every time, when the fighting starts it will be more terrible than the fight that came before. Always it is the worst, the most violent, the least restrained, a steady escalation. The singular rule.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth