40 Quotes by David Liss

Proximity, I have learned, is often as effective as violence.

I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that’s what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry?

Gabriela was in prison for Judaizing, but she recited the prayers of her tormentors. She had not even the comfort of the religion for which she was punished.

I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen of the bench, but it is no secret that our system of justice, praised throughout Europe for its severity and its swiftness, is a terrible and fearful thing, and no man, guilty or innocent, wishes to stand before it.

You are but a hard turd in the ass of my journey.

At what point, I wondered, does silence become complicity?

We are all driven by our passions, and our task is to know when to submit to them and when to resist.

Lucy absently thanked him and at once began to consider which among her gowns would be best suited for a midnight adventure to a gothic castle.

He seemed a man whose youthful promise had yielded nothing but the feelings of failure that come with the advance of age. It is this moment in life, when the bounty of the future becomes the drudgery of the present, that all men fear, myself included, and for that reason I immediately felt a sympathy for this man.