Elizabeth

“All the myths he believed in would crystallize into even greater mythology in future years and become weapons of war used by politicians and evildoers to kill defenseless schoolchildren by the dozens so that a few rich men spouting the same mythology that Doc spouted could buy islands that held more riches than the town of Pottstown had or would ever have. Gigantic yachts that would sail the world and pollute the waters and skies, owned by men creating great companies that made weapons of great power in factories that employed the poor, weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“Art is how you climb out of the abyss after you’ve made yourselves into beasts. You have to hook on and rebuild yourself from outside in. This is why it is essential to live in a civilization offering theaters”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin