The Postmistress of Paris Quotes

“A life of wealth and a life of riches aren’t always the same.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“It was something that was hard to see until you had some measure of success, but it wasn’t success that made one an artist. One was an artist. One was successful or not at selling work, but the sale of art no more made a man an artist than it made him a man. An artist simply was.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Even in the darkest times at Camp des Milles, the men kept making art and music, literature, theatre. It was how they stayed alive. How they helped the world right itself.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“No one suspects American women of anything but needlepoint. Men so seldom imagine us capable of the things we're capable of.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“and”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Angels watching ever round thee All through the night. They will of all fears disarm thee, No forebodings should alarm thee, They will let no peril harm thee All through the night.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“the best dog ever,” she whispered, burying her face in his, opening her mouth wide so that she would taste him, taste his fur and his little black nose, his eyes, that would never stop loving her.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“And yet her father had never braided her hair. A life of wealth and a life of riches aren’t always the same.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good. —Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Where a girl was to wear white and become a happy wife to a man who spent his spare time at his club, a mother to children who would bicker and disappoint. Was”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The Pink Library. “I”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Evil unchecked by the world’s response might be even more ruinous.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“It’s the face we present to the world. I wish to capture what we hide. That which brings us shame.” “And now?” Nanée asked gently. “There is so much violence and shame, slouching and lurking. So much hiding, saying we’re one thing while doing another. Why”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“We never believe the camera has truly captured us unless we appear beautiful. We think photographs showing our ugliness are distortions, bad angles, bad moments. Not who we are.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“German chancellor. But there were good people everywhere, including in the Church.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The Catholic Church supported Pétain, who offered the possibility of restoring France to more “traditional” values that required women to stay home and be good wives, supporting their husbands, and assumed only Christians could have good values. The Vatican, being authoritarian itself, wasn’t much bothered by Hitler; they’d reached a concordat with him only months after he was made”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“but what was logic in a war that began with a phony Polish attack on a German radio station, staged by Hitler’s thugs so they had an excuse to invade?”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“trying to push women back a hundred years on the excuse of not wanting “ladies” to look or act”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“the bromides they put in our food eroding my memory.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The committee sent two representatives to appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. “It didn’t hurt that, just days before, she’d seen a photograph of her friend Lion Feuchtwanger interned at Camp des Milles—and just weeks after he’d been received by then French president Lebrun. Before our deputation left her office, she’d called her husband to assure him that if he refused to authorize our visas, German immigrant leaders, with the help of American friends, would rent a ship to bring them to Washington and cruise up and down the East Coast until the American people, out of shame and anger, forced him and Congress to permit them to land.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“and mostly Jewish, and lord knows anti-Semitism is alive and well under the Stars and Stripes.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“How did you get our country to agree to give you visas for your list?” she persisted. “They’re leftist or downright Communist,”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Picasso, Chagall, Lipchitz, and Matisse; writers like Hannah Arendt; Nobel Laureates; and even the journalist who’d bestowed on the German National Socialist Party the nickname Nazi, Bavarian slang for “bumpkin” or “simpleton,” which became so ubiquitous that Hitler’s only recourse was to embrace it. Fry was working behind the political cover of providing perfectly legal aid to refugees and a CAS “affiliation” with the respected American Red Cross to quietly arrange illegal escapes from France for those on his list. Surely this Fry fellow could use Nanée’s help, and her money too.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The photo had been taken more than a year after the German military stood by as Hitler conducted his Röhm Purge, murdering the military leaders and the prior chancellor, along with dozens or perhaps even hundreds of anti-Nazi journalists. Within weeks the military was swearing unconditional obedience not to Germany or its constitution but to Hitler. How”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“Maybe art was a mirror held up to reality or maybe it was a hammer with which to shape it, Edouard wasn’t sure.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“The little fishing village in Provence was a collecting place for writers”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris

“We all imagine ourselves innocent. Aghast at cruelty. Empathetic. Human. We don't imagine that in simply watching we provide an audience.”
― Meg Waite Clayton, The Postmistress of Paris