Rachel Kadish > Quotes

“Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.”
― Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied: A Sharp Literary Romance – Finding Love That Fulfills Head and Heart

“Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself--or not give yourself--of your free will.”
― Rachel Kadish

“Love isn't rest. Love requires you, from time to time, to rip up your soul and replant it. To dare your lover to do the same. To muster sympathy where it seemed impossible. To be, perpetually, two kids joining hands, drawing breath, and deep diving.”
― Rachel Kadish

“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market. FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn’t care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around.”
― Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied: A Sharp Literary Romance – Finding Love That Fulfills Head and Heart

“Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“She'd spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Nature gave a woman not only body but also intelligence, and a wish to employ it. Was it then predetermined that one side of Ester’s nature must suffocate the other? If two of God’s creations were opposed, must it be that God decided in advance that one was more perfect and therefore must be victorious? Did God determine before each storm that either the wind or the oak tree must prevail, one being more dear to Him? Or perhaps, rather, the storm itself was God’s most prized creation—and only through it could the contest between wind and oak tree be resolved, and one proven hardier. Perhaps—she trembled at her own heresy—the storm itself was God.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“For every loyalty, whether to self or community, does impose a blindness, and each love does threaten to blur vision, as few can bear to see truth if it harm that which is dear to us.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“You’re American,” she said simply. “You think straightforwardness is a virtue.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself...and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Esther now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body - and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Do you wonder, ever,” said Ester quietly, “whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we’re determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.” The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“The greatest act of love—indeed, the only religion she could comprehend—was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“People misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. Q.E.D.: No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don't blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands."
-Tracy Farber”
― Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied: A Sharp Literary Romance – Finding Love That Fulfills Head and Heart

“woman must have a heart made of something tougher, or she dies when a first blow comes.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Yet sacrifice of the self is everywhere viewed as the highest calling, and the more so for a woman, who must give every element of her life to others. Kindness is at all times counseled to women, who are called unnatural if not kind.

Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one--though it benefit others--be called good? Is it in face kindness to sever oneself from one's own desires? Mustn't the imperative to protect all life encompass--even for a woman--her own?

Then we must abandon our accustomed notion of a woman's kindness, and forge a new own.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Sentiment would undo her - each of its ties were a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior - gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness - turned to shackles.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“And she thought: don’t trust love unless you can see what it costs the lover.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub’s windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, “How do you think people get strong?”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“I understand why we sleep. To slip the knot of the world.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind, but for a woman there could be no such luxury... How readily the rules of female behavior--gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness--turn to shackles.

So, she thought, there must be declared a new kind of virtue: one that made the throwing off of such rules, and even such deceit as this required, praiseworthy.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink