Emma Richler > Quotes

“How one can never truly leave. And never quite return. Do you understand?”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“The older she grows, the farther she walks. It is a good thing the world is round and she is fond of walking in circles or else she might disappear across three times nine countries in the thirtieth tsardom!”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Everything is connected,' stated Rachel. 'Patterns everywhere.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Marry me, Rachel.'

'Not yet.'

'Tomorrow, Rachel. Marry me.'

'Maybe tomorrow.'

'There is no common blood between us. Say it,' pleads Zachariah.

'There is no common blood between us,' murmurs Rachel.

'I am not your brother.'

'I know.'

He traces her face with his swollen fingers, across the brow bones and down the zygomatics, and along the jaw from earlobe to chin, sweeping away the brine as he goes.

'I am your Wolff,' he says.

'And I am your Wolff,' she replies.

Let the day begin.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Come and kiss me, my darling.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Snow can sometimes fall from a cloudless sky.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“I know so little, she tells herself again, searching her mother's face. In the end, we know so little.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Even very great things, he meant, can't last forever. Or beautiful things, I suppose. Those too. Things that don't really need replacing except because they fall apart.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“This is not a sweet skein of thought. Unthread it, Rachel.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“A wolf's sense of hearing is remarkably acute. A wolf can detect another's howl from as far as nineteen kilometres away.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Hopes are so well constructed, so monstrously dashed!”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Away from Lev, she craves his need for her. When with him, it enervates. Why is that? She cannot help it. Nothing to be done. Only with her sister is she unfettered. Tasha never makes her think about it, the terrible stature of love. Its shape, size, weight, the long shadows it casts. With Tasha she never goes cold as stones in a river, as Lev will accuse. You are suddenly so cold! Cold as stones in a river! What have I done wrong? he complains. Nothing. Nothing, my darling.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“She watches her mother drink, then sits by her again before the picture window to watch the snow fall, watching closely until she can hear it.

. . . Rachel listens to snow. And beyond snow.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity.

In Zachariah, she sees infinity.

Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale.

There is a template for all things.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“When Rachel asks him about days before his life as a Wolff, he will scowl and fidget and so she learns to wait for his recollections and, because it is so difficult for him, she will listen without speaking, collecting the pieces of his past painstakingly like a jigsaw maker, or a batsman accumulating runs, in awe of the impossible distance between a sliver of blue and a great sky, between three runs and a century, between a shard of memory and memory itself.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Aleksei with his impossible curls so very like her own, yet less seemly perhaps. Such hair is somewhat fairy-tale in a man. Poetic.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“In Aleksei's fanciful dream of two Katherines by Caucasian blue waters, his sister and his English love, there is a child also, a fairy-tale girl, he fancies, with flyaway hair at the nape. She chirps gaily as a bird and is rosier than a red rose and whiter than white snow.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Be my wolf," she says.

"I am your wolf," he replies, fighting for wind.

Let the day begin.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Remembrance is so physical!”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Every man has a part and a destiny, some stronger than others.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“How vast is my London! How strange my native place!”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Rachel believes in it, the laws of of pattern formation and how they are universal: whatever she sees, crystallizing, a landscape of fractals, of emergence and symmetry, her world falling happily into shape where he must forge it, a pioneer of industry, sooty and scarred. For Rachel Wolff, quite simply, there are patterns everywhere, she can't help it; she is an illustrator, naturalist, cartographer—and her eye, a kaleidoscope.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“What I was really thinking,' resumes Rachel, 'is—well, that there's fate, you see. I don't dismiss it, I don't think it's idiotic. It's quite scientific, actually. What we become. Who we—meet, end up with,' she continues, flames in her cheeks.

'You think we would have met, no matter what? Even if I were some lushy? Some loon? Street kid?'

'You're laughing at me.'

'Just asking,' he says.

'Everyone has one person, I think. For life. That's all.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“His mother, Zach explained, taught the Romantics and named her sons accordingly, extravagantly, tempting fate. She plays a terrible game of names. Thomas Love survives his beloved elder brother Percy Bysshe who died in a sailing accident. Percy Bysshe, buried at sea. The name and the man, a strange attractor. Everything is true.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Why so sad?" Zach queries in fairy-tale tones. "Rachel?"

"O my brother Ivanushka," she recites. "A heavy stone is round my throat, silken grass grows through my fingers, yellow sand lies on my breast."

"That's perishing gloomy," Zach remarks.

"It ends happily though. Gracious! Everything sounds depressing this morning," adds Rachel. "There's a teacher at my school, she's very young, but she goes, Gracious! Just like a dowager. Makes me laugh. Except this morning. I can't help it. I am too depressed. I hate those voices so much. In the Gardens."

"Stop listening," Zach scolds and put his hands in her hair—silken grass grows through his fingers.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“And as he recalls the old soldier's wisdom regarding bullets and fate, how pointless evasion is when each shot has a man's name on it, he lurches upright, to the waist, a roaring sound in his ears.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“The Hussar never does see his English Katherine again except in dreams and hopes and luxurious regret, and the child he dreams turns out to be a boy, not a girl, with flyaway hair.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“These are involuntary muscles. His eyes sting, his scalp prickles—he wants to cry! You know how if you remember something very horrid or something very lovely that happened, your heart jumps? Cardiac muscle is involuntary too, Zach! Remembrance is physical. Do you see?”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“. . . sitting up cross-legged and noting the light, how it fills the room in streams, etching out the shape of Zach recumbent, a bold coastline in a clarion sky. I drop anchor here, thinks Rachel. Anywhere here. You are my home, my horizon, my shore. How long is the coast of Britain?”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff