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The Women in the Castle
Jessica Shattuck
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted -- and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion. He will think of it every time he goes to a museum or a concert or a play with a long line of people waiting to get inside.”
“For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.”
“In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt.”
“And it means reasonable citizens must take action,” Connie continued. “We are not all thugs and villains. But we will become these, if we don’t try to make change.”
“What does it take for a person to be able to recognize evil as it unfolds? To see with foresight and acuity .”
“Instead she squeezes Mary’s arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.”
“Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn’t yet come to knock it down.”
“This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face.”
“There is so much gray between the black and the white and this is where most of us live, trying, but so often failing, to bend towards the light.”
“expedience could not take precedence over the pursuit of justice.”
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Book Keywords:
government, willful-ignorance, country-pride, history, music, history-of-mankind, world-war-2