Quotes from Stones from the River

“About endings....unless we do them well, we have to keep repeating them.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where—as the stories changed—it transformed you, too.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“...much of what the church calls sin is simply being human.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one doing the persecuting-- both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“High in the hazy sky, the snowfkakes looked tiny and all alike, but as they drifted past the narrow window of the sewing room, all were unique - long or round or triangular - as if they'd borrowed their shapes from the clouds they'd come from.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“And what she wanted more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more - differences in size and race and belief....”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping—that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“And what she hated more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more - no more differences in size and belief- differences that became justification for destruction.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Deine Anpassungsfäheigkeit—Your ability to adapt,” her husband said, “is far more dangerous to you than any of them will ever be. You’ll keep adapting and adapting until nothing is left.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“We Germans have a history of sacrificing everything for one strong leader,” her father had said. “It’s our fear of chaos.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn't mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn't understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“With the stories of people she’d known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“These are things," Trudi's father told her long before she was old enough for confession, "that the church calls sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing--" He paused. "--is to be kind.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“And throughout all, Trudi wove the assurance...that - once someone had been in your life - you could keep that person there despite the agony of loss, as long as you had faith that you could bring the sum of all your hours together in one shining moment.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Because of the people in history, Trudi felt a far stronger link than ever before to the people in her town, and from all this grew new stories, which she told to Eva and her father, and to Frau Abramowitz who listened to every word and sighed, “Trudi, you and your splendid imagination.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Trudi’s gift lay in knowing. Knowing the words that named the thoughts inside people’s minds, the words that masked the fears and secrets inside their hearts. To force their secrets to the surface like water farts and let them rip through the silence. They called her a snoop, a meddler. But even though she was more inconvenient to them than ever before, they kept coming back—to borrow books, they liked to believe—yet, what they really came for, even those who feared Trudi Montag, were the stories she told them about their neighbors and relatives. What they brought Trudi in return were stories of their own lives, which they yielded to her questions or, unknowingly, to her ears as she overheard them talk to each other between the stacks; and they didn’t even miss what she had taken from them until the words they’d bartered in return for her tales had ripened into new stories that”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“The risk her stories posed to others—and to herself—was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she’d found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn’t stay away from a secret—drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle—though she sensed it would be better for her not to know.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Carefully, the girl skimmed her fingers across her mother's knee. It was smooth; the skin had closed across the tiny wounds like the surface of the river after you toss stones into the waves. Only you knew they were there. Unless you told.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“These are thing," Trudi's father told her long before she was old enough for confession, "that the church call sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing--" He paused. "--is to be kind.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

“Only a few people in Burgdorf had read Mein Kampf, and many thought that all this talk about Rssenreinheit-purity of the race-was ludicrous and impossible to enforce. Yet the long training in obedience to elders, government, and church made it difficult-even for those who considered the views of the Nazis dishonorable-to give voice to their misgivings. And so they kept hushed, yielding to each new indignity while they waited for the Nazis and their ideas to go away, but with each compliance they relinquished more of themselves, weakening the texture of the community while the power of the Nazis swelled.”
― Ursula Hegi, quote from Stones from the River

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Popular quotes

“Es fácil imaginar que la enorme capacidad humana para las actividades sociales, para manipular a los demás, para la política, y para la acción concertada del tipo que da como resultado grandes y complejas sociedades, surge de esta habilidad para ponerse en el lugar del otro y manipular la atención y el interés de esa otra persona.”
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“And I will get to climb on that big beautiful bike of yours and wrap my arms around you and lean into all that gorgeous hair and smell you, and hear you laugh and see your eyes flash fire. Or I may as well just kick it right now because you, Dani Mega O’Malley, make me feel alive like nothing else does.”
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“We all reach a point as young adults when we wonder what we should be doing with our lives—or, at the very least, which direction to point ourselves in. Beyond the means to get by, we need to think about what’s most important to us. Not surprisingly, I discovered that for me the answer was family.”
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“Dear ignoramuses,

Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance.

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.

Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.”
― Jenny Colgan, quote from Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams

“And it's a little different with every guy, so it's kind of hard to generalize—but if I had to describe the feeling of a crush, I'd say this: you just finished running a mile, and you have to throw up, and you're starving, but no food seems appealing, and your brain becomes fog, and you also have to pee. It's this close to intolerable. But I like it.”
― Becky Albertalli, quote from The Upside of Unrequited

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