The Invisible Bridge Quotes

“And what if I fail?"
"Ah! Then you'll have a story to tell.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“He allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“...when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Practice at hunger makes the fast easier.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now - that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“The [bird's] nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Things got worse. Paralyzing fear came to seem like a luxury.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“forward.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“God asks the most of those he loves best.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“me to Munkaszolgálat websites”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Varosliget, the young dancer who had loved Sandor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see insider her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shit deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“He could almost see insider her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shit deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Life, oblivious to his grief, continued”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohány Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded art, five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Mátyás, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain - to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time - how could anyone begin to grasp it?”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“How astounding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand. How astounding that the largest thing he’d ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge