83 Quotes by Emma Richler

When Rachel asks him about days before his life as a Wolff, he will scowl and fidget and so she learns to wait for his recollections and, because it is so difficult for him, she will listen without speaking, collecting the pieces of his past painstakingly like a jigsaw maker, or a batsman accumulating runs, in awe of the impossible distance between a sliver of blue and a great sky, between three runs and a century, between a shard of memory and memory itself.

These are involuntary muscles. His eyes sting, his scalp prickles—he wants to cry! You know how if you remember something very horrid or something very lovely that happened, your heart jumps? Cardiac muscle is involuntary too, Zach! Remembrance is physical. Do you see?

She misses this, and other things, moments. Scenes and moments.

Zach's eyelids flutter and droop, his mind a pleasant jumble—things said tonight, last year, last month, things said in dreams. He sees Lev, Tasha, Rachel, and something he read earlier, what was it? In one of Rachel's books, circled in pen, a book of Natural History. 'Many birds and mammals, wolves in particular, have a—' What? Oh yes. '—a fateful preference for the ancestral nesting place.' And Rachel wrote in the margin: 'Ha ha ha! It has a strange attraction!

Every phrase Aleksei uttered in Raphael's sister's presence sounding like bells, he could not help it, everything he said, a declaration of love!

I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.

Where his boyhood retreat had been a cave hewn for one, it now accommodated two. He was suddenly two and it amazed and delighted, causing a stir in the pit of him, a kind of fibrillation.

Why are you so sad?" asks Zachariah in full fairy-tale voice, casting his arms wide for emphasis, displaying his superior reach.

Aleksei with his impossible curls so very like her own, yet less seemly perhaps. Such hair is somewhat fairy-tale in a man. Poetic.