12 Quotes by Jillian Cantor

But I am thinking about the way Ezra yelled at Joshua, not so dissimilar to the way my mother and sister used to yell at each other. You have to love someone to yell at them so intensely; you have to care so unbelievably much that your anger explodes and burns across the sky like the Soviet’s Sputnik I’ve read so much about. My sister always thought they fought because Mother hated her, but I knew better.

She’s a different person now. So is he, of course. But her memory is intact. She’s living her life in the future, in a Germany that’s finally free after so many years of her fighting. My father, on the other hand, is living his life in a muddled past.

But what I have come to understand as I watch the lonely flicker of my candle and listen for the faintest echo of Mother’s voice is this: sometimes we breathe because we have to, not because we want to.