Amy

“Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down. <...> If you want to get on in life there's things in life you have to ignore so that you can keep on.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation—and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Five years is a long time to grieve," Llewelyn said at last, and Davydd shook his head.
"Grief heals," he said. "Guilt does not.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, The Reckoning