Ursula Hegi Quotes

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.

I think ... you should have children, John." At least he's no longer talking about bugs.
"I'm too young, Dad."
"It's the most important thing ... I've done in ... my life.

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 ...

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.

Everyone does it."
"But no one talks about it," Gloria said. "About the different levels of skill involved. You have to practice before you become a great masturbator.

"But no one" title="Ursula Hegi Quotes: Everyone does it."
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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.

She also told me it wore down her spirit to live in the desert landscape that was parched by midsummer, to plant a garden each spring and struggle to keep it alive past July.

What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more.

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.

Their train speeds through the cities and crosses rivers until it reaches Paris. They leave the station, their arms around each other, and walk to the Jardin des Plantes where the panther paces the length of his cage. The young teacher nods as Hannelore Beier reaches into the cage, and strokes the animal's magnificent neck. The panther arches his back. A curtain lifts from his pupils as the pastor's sister slides aside the bolt that has kept him in captivity. His eyes like sudden, green flames, he recognizes a world beyond the bars of his cage.

it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life--not the life of a stranger as I had imagined--but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.

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.

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.

In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

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.

About endings ... unless we do them well, we have to keep repeating them.

I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.

A perfectly happy marriage? There is no such thing. There are strong marriages that can survive problems, but happiness is such a brief condition, interrupted by difficulties and plain, boring routine.

The absence of doubt will turn humans into beasts.

If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother's palm. Yet, when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.

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.

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.

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.