Jonathan Rabb > Quotes

“This morning he had imagined he would know everything she had lived through. How foolish of him. He had forgotten the one truth of the Lager: that nothing is ever shared. Hunger and cold, yes, but the rest...these horrors lived inside the mind in pure isolation.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“Yes, I know you know. And I know you know better than most. I understand, but this ain’t like what you had in the war in those camps. I’m sorry to say it, but it ain’t the same. They tried to kill you, all a you, all at once. I seen that. But here they kill us one at a time and that’s a difference.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“He tried to empty his mind as he stood at the top of the stairs. It was always best to come at these things without something to say: so much anticipated of him, as if he were only waiting for the opportunity to unburden himself. To see them all thinking, "I understand what it is you've lived through" - if only there wasn't such a desperate longing in each of them to run. What a bind to put themselves in, the moral weight of it all, to be brave and consoling even as they felt nothing but pity and revulsion. Was it wrong to be revolted by a man like this? Did his story forgive them that? Wouldn't he forgive them that? Didn't they deserve to be forgiven?”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“They had never spoken about the war, about anything before Savannah. Goldah had told himself there had been no need. They knew each other, knew the shared silences to their cores. Now Goldah saw how naive that had been. There was a ranking, even to victims, and severity had no cause against time.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“I was simply frightened for my daughter — more frightened than you can understand — and such things trump anyone’s feelings, no matter who they might be or what they might have gone through.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“He had worked his way back to food, real food, with taste and texture and heat, and while his stomach had learned to reaccommodate it, the rest of him was having more difficulty. There were any number of reasons for it - obvious reasons such as memory and shame - but the simplest was that to savor a plate was to recognize his own worth and that was something not so easily restored.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living

“That was the malleability of memories: They lived in pockets of the mind, vivid or dulled depending on the lens one chose to see them through.”
― Jonathan Rabb, Among the Living