The Puzzle Master Quotes

“When all the horrors of life have revealed themselves, it is beauty that God sends to comfort us.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“There is a story from the midrash that I've always loved," she said. "It's about Lailah, the angel of conception. Lailah, the story goes, bequeaths babies the totality of knowledge in the womb. Then, when the baby is born, Lailah presses the child's lips, and all is forgotten. The story presupposes that all knowledge exists, that we don't actually acquire it, but collect what we've lost as we grow older. Perhaps your injury has allowed you to tap into what we all once knew before we were born.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“Knowledge is seductive”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master: A Novel

“Sometimes a secret remains out of reach for a reason.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“God was, he said, light. Not metaphorically. Not abstractly. But literally all of the attributes we associate with photons of light—a ubiquitous presence that moves freely through space and time, an energy with the creative capacities to generate life on a molecular level—these are the qualities of the creative power we know as God.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“I was heartbroken when he got sick, and often angry, but my husband wasn’t bitter. He accepted his death with the same sense of purpose as he lived his life. He believed that our mission here is to learn to see, really see, the beauty of creation and to understand that the central purpose of existence is not achievement or comfort or even human connection but making our way back to the source of everything: that infinite point of light that is God. He taught me that we must always fight for what we believe. And that,” she said, glancing over at him, “is why I want to help you.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“Security is existential. It encompasses all elements of a man’s being: physical, intellectual, spiritual, financial.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“As such, in Kabbalah, there is an inverse force in the universe called Klipot. It is the force of darkness or evil, the opposite of the Tree of Life. The Klipot is often characterized as being the product of broken shells, or hollow vessels that have cracked. The story goes that when God tried to create the universe the first time, His emanation was so powerful that it broke the vessels meant to contain it. He tried again and created the world as we know it. But the earlier, broken universe did not disappear. It remained, in opposition to the universe we inhabit.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“Palindromes, one-letter shift ciphers, even a Greek decryption device called the scytale—all of these were used to hide the true nature of God’s sacred being.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“the next seconds swelled, slowed, filled with a tension that pressed through me. And then, in that close stillness, the creature awoke. The eyes fluttered open and for ten seconds, perhaps twenty, I watched as the doll twitched to life. But just as the force swelled, it overwhelmed the creature. I began to move about in a most terrifying manner, its eyes shifting around the room in a crazed fashion. The rabbi put a hand over the doll's face, spoke the words again, and life left the doll....I stared at all of this, astonished, too terrified to speak and yet too fascinated to run. "We can make the golem live," Jakob said. "But we need a strong shell. a better shell. One made of porcelain." The rabbi met my eye, and I understood at last what they wanted of me..”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

“these changes to his way of experiencing reality were so strange that he didn't say anything about them at first. All he knew was he was experiencing highly-structured geometric hallucinations on regular basis, and while he knew what he saw was real, he wasn't sure anyone would believe him if he tried to explain it.." pp21”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master