Julie Orringer Quotes

was pregnant, his father had written back

It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return.

Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he'd been sick in Debrecen she'd taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he'd be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the tie when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father's orchard.

Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her

I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

He allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past.

No one can hold all of me at once. Does this constitute a crime?

I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.

You will stay up all night reading this brilliant and devastating novel the way you might have with a new best friend in junior high-one whose revelations thrilled and terrified you, and whose raw, hard-earned wisdom remade the way you saw the world. It evokes the genius of Angela Pneumans canonical progenitors: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy. Lay It on My Heart is a gorgeous, riveting, and unforgettable book.

Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate.

What is left of a woman once her last five pounds are gone?

Nothing at all to change: what a thing to want in the midst of war.

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.

It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer." "What's it mean?" "The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.

Life, oblivious to his grief, continued

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck