Quotes from The Devil's Arithmetic

Jane Yolen ·  170 pages

Rating: (46.3K votes)


“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


About the author

Jane Yolen
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
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Popular quotes

“We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . .I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from The Chosen


“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Daughter of Smoke & Bone


“من بیشتر با شکست یافتگان احساس همدردی می‌کنم تا با مقدسین. گمان می‌کنم که من قهرمانی و تقدس را زیاد نمی‌پسندم. آنچه برایم جالب است انسان بودن است.”
― Albert Camus, quote from The Plague


“It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.”
― Ally Condie, quote from Matched


“Kaladin screamed, reaching the end of the bridge. Finding a tiny surge of strength somewhere, he raised his spear and threw himself off the end of the wooden platform, launching into the air above the cavernous void.
Bridgemen cried out in dismay. Syl zipped about him with worry. Parshendi looked up with amazement as a lone bridgeman sailed through the air toward them.
His drained, worn-out body barely had any strength left. In that moment of crystallized time, he looked down on his enemies. Parshendi with their marbled red and black skin. Soldiers raising finely crafted weapons, as if to cut him from the sky. Strangers, oddities in carapace breastplates and skullcaps. Many of them wearing beards.
Beards woven with glowing gemstones.
Kaladin breathed in.
Like the power of salvation itself—like rays of sunlight from the eyes of the Almighty—Stormlight exploded from those gemstones. It streamed through the air, pulled in visible streams, like glowing columns of luminescent smoke. Twisting and turning and spiraling like tiny funnel clouds until they slammed into him.
And the storm came to life again.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from The Way of Kings


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