Ellen Feldman > Quotes

“The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.”
― Ellen Feldman, Next to Love

“Love may endure a lifetime, but it is less reliable on a day-to-day basis.”
― Ellen Feldman

“We're not sitting with those people. We never saw them before in our lives.”
― Ellen Feldman, The Living and the Lost

“There's no logic to intolerance.”
― Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You

“Jewish”
― Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You

“No one but a fool would try to erase the past. The only hope was to guard against it.”
― Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You

“A woman’s duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in her eyes, to have an ideal, to speak and act in defiance of convention.”
― Ellen Feldman, Terrible Virtue

“But I was not crying for anything in that house. I was crying for the innocence of that father walking home through the blushing Amsterdam evening, for the hope of that woman scrubbing a new flat for a new life, for the boy who thought he was safe. I was crying for a world that saw a war coming, that feared the worst, but had no inkling how bad the worst could be. I was crying for a world that, for all its misery, had not heard of concentration camps, or mass showers that spray death, or chimneys that spew human ashes, or medical experiments on men who happen to have red hair or children who happen to be twins. I was crying for a paradise I had tried to recreate for my wife and children, and myself, and for my failure. I cried for the second murder of my parents, the one I had committed by silence.”
― Ellen Feldman, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank

“So this was the way they got to you in America. No roundups, no camps, merely insidious cruelty to your children.”
― Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You