Joyce

“Because, says Emilia, there was a rumor about you. Someone swore that, when you were a little girl, he once saw you touch a tiger. And the tiger didn't harm you, it let you stroke it. It was always said that you had charmed the beast, like an enchantress. Impossible, of course, but—
Not impossible, says Lucrezia, not at all.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

“What he was saying was of no importance in itself, it had all been said before so many times, repeated parrot-like but with an air of acute perception and originality by one person after another, in one country after another, all the way down through history. After all, even Hitler was unable to think up anything really new on the subject of the Jews; he merely said what everybody else had been saying, only of course he said it louder and oftener, and put it a bit more strongly.”
― Gwethalyn Graham, Earth and High Heaven

“We demand justice and we get process.”
― Desmond Cole, The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

“A Jew describes another Jew simply as a human being; a Gentile describes him, first and foremost, as a Jew. Even if the Gentile doesn’t happen to be generalizing at the moment, nevertheless the whole description is given in terms of that one specific frame of reference, at least by implication, so that the finished portrait is, at best, distorted and somewhat less than life size. The highest compliment the average Gentile can pay a Jew, apparently, is to say that he doesn’t look or behave like one, so that although it may only be operating in the negative, the frame of reference is still there.”
― Gwethalyn Graham, Earth and High Heaven