Sandra Gulland · 448 pages
Rating: (14K votes)
“I play out the cards. They say: This is Heaven, this is Hell. It is one.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“He calls me Josephine. He says I'm an angel, a saint, his good lucky star. I know I'm no angel, but in truth I have begun to like this Josephine he sees. She is intelligent; she amuses; she is pleasing. She is grace and charm and heart. Unlike Rose; scared, haunted and needy. Unlike Rose with her sad life.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“A feeling of disquiet continues to haunt me. As a youth one dreams of love; by the time one wakes, it is too late.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“The Queen has been guillotined, accused of crimes beyond imagining. Last night she appeared to me in a dream, handing me her head.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“You are thinking of the past." I put my arms around her. She'd risen from childbed too soon. "We are the past," she said.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“Daggers ever at the ready, I went about the day: children fed, linens mended, bedclothes aired. In little ways one conquers fear.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“I lowered myself into an armchair. I was enveloped in a cloud of dust. All that remained of my life was in my lap. I sat for a time thus, as still as the mute objects that surrounded me. How little it all meant, in the end.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“I kissed his cheek. "My King." I swooped into the courtly curtsy he'd taught me as a girl, regally kicking an imaginary train aside as I turned to go. He was laughing silently as I left. For a moment I saw that spark again. I did not say goodbye.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“Now I have discovered where it is that she goes. It's the guillotine that draws her, across the river in the Place Louis Quinze- Place de la Revolution now-where daily crowds gather, the vendors selling lemonade, the children playing prisoner's base, the old ladies gossiping as the heads fall.”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“One leads, willing or not," Deputy Tallien answered. "It takes courage to face one's own death but even more so the death of others. We are learning this lesson well." The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gullan”
― Sandra Gulland, quote from The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
Sandra Gulland
Born place: in Miami, The United States
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“The extermination of the Jews has sometimes been seen as a kind of industrialized, assembly-line kind of mass murder, and this picture has at least some element of truth to it. No other genocide in history has been carried out by mechanical means - gassing - in specially constructed facilities like those in operation at Auschwitz or Treblinka. At the same time, however, these facilities did not operate efficiently or effectively, and if the impression given by calling them industrialized is that they were automated or impersonal, then it is a false one. Men such as Hess and Stangl and their subordinates tried to insulate themselves from the human dimensions of what they were doing by referring to their victims as 'cargo' or 'items.' Talking to Gerhard Stabenow, the head of the SS Security Service in Warsaw, in September 1942, Wilm Hosenfeld noted how the language Stabenow used distanced himself from the fact that what he was involved in was the mass murder of human beings: 'He speaks of the Jews as ants or other vermin, of their 'resettlement', that means their mass murder, as he would of the extermination of the bedbugs in the disinfestation of a house.' But at the same time such men were not immune from the human emotions they tried so hard to repress, and they remembered incidents in which individual women and children had appealed to their conscience, even if such appeals were in vain. The psychological strain that continual killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children, imposed on such men was considerable, just as it had been in the case of the SS Task Forces, whose troops had been shooting Jews in their hundreds of thousands before the first gas vans were deploted in an attempt not only to speed up the killing but also to make it somehow more impersonal.”
― Richard J. Evans, quote from The Third Reich at War
“Internet, jogos de video, computadores, são úteis, mas tâm destruído algo inviolável: a infância. Onde está o prazer do silência? Onde está a arte da observação? Onde está a inocência? Angustia-me que o sistema esteja a gerar crianças insatisfeitas e ansiosas. Fortes candidatas a serem doentes psiquiátricos e não seres humanos felizes e livres.”
― Augusto Cury, quote from The Dreamseller: The Calling
“And asking people to take the time to read and actually think about stuff? Heaven forbid.”
― David Baldacci, quote from First Family
“How do you decide what is good and bad? The one who sees the bad in what is good is a bad man. Karna is a good man, but he sees good even in what is bad. His seeing it as good doesn’t make the bad good, but makes his goodness look bad.”
― Kavita Kané, quote from Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen
“Dean is still asleep. His clothes are strewn about. The shutters are closed. He never dreams. He’s like a dead musician, like a spent runner. He hasn’t the strength to dream, or rather, his dreams take place while he is awake and they are marvelous for at least one quality: he has the power to prolong them.”
― James Salter, quote from A Sport and a Pastime
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