“You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“We are all monsters" Hannah said. "Because we are letting it happen." She said it not as if she believed it but as she were to repeat something she had heard before.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself. There will be times when he will surround you with walls of darkness. But remember always that your soul is secure to you, for your soul is entire, and that he cannot enter your soul, for your soul is part of God.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“Passover isn't about eating, Hannah," her mother began at last, sighing and pushing her fingers through her silver-streaked hair. "You could have fooled me," Hannah muttered.”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
“If we do not laugh, we will cry. Crying will only make us hotter and sweatier. We Jews like to joke about death because what you laugh at and make familiar can no longer frighten you. Besides, Chayaleh, what else is there to do?”
― Jane Yolen, quote from The Devil's Arithmetic
Jane Yolen
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
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“Is that what you feel? Like you’re invisible?” That connection I didn’t understand flamed within my chest. Building and intensifying. “Because you’re the only thing I see.” He flinched. “That’s the problem with all of this.”
― A.L. Jackson, quote from Stand
“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
― Ted Chiang, quote from Stories of Your Life and Others
“That one doesn’t count. The poor scoundrel is deaf, but he makes a fine sniffer. How do you think we found you?”
― H.S. Crow, quote from Lunora and the Monster King
“Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, “As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power
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Selected LettersBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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