Top 50 Olivia Hawker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.”

— Olivia Hawker

2. “Did not Saint Francis say, The world is my cloister, my body is my cell, and my soul is the hermit within?”

— Olivia Hawker

3. “Weeping may endure for a night – joy comes with the morning.”

— Olivia Hawker

4. “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed, without opposition, by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today, every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?”

— Olivia Hawker

5. “So you hardened yourself and hoped the fear couldn’t touch you. But once you’ve turned yourself to stone, love can’t reach you, either.”

— Olivia Hawker

6. “Weeping may endure for a night – joy comes with the morning. I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.”

— Olivia Hawker

7. “After a time, you won’t cry over it anymore. The pain won’t hurt so badly.” And spring will come, you’ll see. The snow will melt away. Winter’s dark can’t last forever.”

— Olivia Hawker

8. “What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect? We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power? How far back must we go – we, as a people – to undo each small step toward infamy?”

— Olivia Hawker

9. “How can any man claim those qualities now – integrity, mercy, justice? Everything the Reich has done, all the cruelties and death, the burial of our rights in an unmarked grave – none of it has been Anton’s will, nor does he approve. Yet he can’t help feeling he is to blame. And aren’t we all to blame? What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect?”

— Olivia Hawker

10. “Each had taken up the truths they had trained themselves to see, drinking anger and hate or loneliness and despair as eagerly as the summer-parched prairie drank the rain. I ain’t fool enough to think I’m wise, exactly, but I have learned one scrap of wisdom, at least: whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.”

— Olivia Hawker

11. “Before the power of Nature, its inescapable presence and fixed dominion, all men and women are as mice in the talons of the hawk. In a city, I could well imagine – surrounded by streets and commerce and carriages, everyone dressed Sunday-fine, with the forests and fields only a thin shadow on a distant horizon – a body might trick itself into believing that mankind held the world in its white-knuckled hand. But on our homestead, the wilderness ran right up to the front door.”

— Olivia Hawker

12. “History is our guilty conscience; it will not let us rest. Perhaps we will never learn the origin of this sickness, but we understand its cure. We.”

— Olivia Hawker

13. “He remembers a building in Munich, the great green letters painted on its flat, windowless wall, the words of the White Rose: “We will not be silent. We are your guilty conscience. The White Rose will never leave you in peace.”

— Olivia Hawker

14. “Grant me one more day of love, God, and one more, and another. One more blue afternoon with my children’s voices filling the sky – this, my only music. One more sight of their breath rising in plumes against the cold, so I may know they’re still breathing. Give me time enough to fix these memories in my heart. Let me write this love upon my soul.”

— Olivia Hawker

15. “Because I have seen, I believe – I know – that darkness cannot last forever. And beyond night’s edge, there is light.”

— Olivia Hawker

16. “If you leave the homeless to wander without shelter, will you be able to meet your own eyes in the mirror without shame? If you do what’s easy, instead of what’s right, will you ever hold your head up again when your spouse speaks your name? If you turn your backs while children starve in your fields, can you ever again touch your own child’s face without agony?”

— Olivia Hawker

17. “The same evil Opa fought – he and countless others – still lives. It thrives now on American soil.”

— Olivia Hawker

18. “It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.”

— Olivia Hawker

19. “We march inexorably toward our destination. There is no curve or gentle slope to relieve us; straight ahead lies the conclusion of our national folly, the terrible work we set in motion at some unknown point in time. Behind, the long, narrow way of our past, paved in hard history and stretching into blackness.”

— Olivia Hawker

20. “This is a small happiness, in a mad and dangerous world. But it’s better than gold, better than music, to know you made another person happy. To know you’ve kept them safe.”

— Olivia Hawker

21. “We’ve almost won.”

— Olivia Hawker

22. “Music is a way of transporting emotion from one breast to another. It is a way of knowing the unknowable, of feeling what we can never allow ourselves to confront in any other way. These agonies and ecstasies – they can break us, use us up, burn us away unless we shield our hearts with music.”

— Olivia Hawker

23. “You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. That is what the Lord asks of us in every role: father, mother, brother, child. Neighbor and friend – nun and friar. That is all the Lord asks – that we live by Christ’s example.”

— Olivia Hawker

24. “Your feelings are your compass. They guide you to what’s right.”

— Olivia Hawker

25. “The seasons don’t cease to change because we haven’t the time to plant or tend or harvest, because grief like a hailstorm comes up sudden and frightens us with its noise. Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.”

— Olivia Hawker

26. “They want you tired and distracted. They plan to burn this world down.”

— Olivia Hawker

27. “Lord, grant me the strength to use what poor talents You have given me, wisely and well. And whatever I do, let me do it for Your true purpose and not the whim of any man.”

— Olivia Hawker

28. “In this world, evil heaps itself on evil, and the spire of unchecked power climbs higher by the day. This is a tower of man’s own building.”

— Olivia Hawker

29. “You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words.”

— Olivia Hawker

30. “I can’t turn back time. I can’t tell where we first went wrong – we, this people, this nation to which I belong. And if I could, I would have no way to stop whatever progress has led us here. I am too weak, too human.”

— Olivia Hawker

31. “The matter is settled. Let Unterboihingen open its doors and welcome the refugees in.”

— Olivia Hawker

32. “Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.”

— Olivia Hawker

33. “As I watched the US I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape – a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid – a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques – I knew the time had come.”

— Olivia Hawker

34. “We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power?”

— Olivia Hawker

35. “God is said to be great, the worm told me, so great you cannot see Him. But God is small, with hands like threads, and they reach for you everywhere you go. The hands touch everything – even you, even me. What falls never falls; what grows has grown a thousand times, and will live a thousand times more. Wherever hand touches hand, the Oneness comes to stay. Once God has made a thing whole, it cannot be broken again.”

— Olivia Hawker

36. “Of course we resist.”

— Olivia Hawker

37. “Hear this, we pray you, ye heads of the house of Power, and princes of the house of Oppression, that abhor judgment and pervert all equality. You build up our nation with blood, and stain the world with iniquity.”

— Olivia Hawker

38. “If they could open their hands and release the old guide ropes to which they had always clung – anger and timidity, lonesomeness and fear, judgment and the fear of being judged – they would free their spirits to seek and find a new way of being, new eyes through which to see.”

— Olivia Hawker

39. “The resistance is everywhere. Didn’t I tell you once that love couldn’t be erased from the world so easily?”

— Olivia Hawker

40. “Spring slips rapidly away into summer.”

— Olivia Hawker

41. “Men cry – all the time. Our tears are the glass of our compass case, and the needle that points our way.”

— Olivia Hawker

42. “No force can silence us, unless we permit silence. I prefer to roar.”

— Olivia Hawker

43. “She can’t release the past as easily as that. Who among us can? What has gone before drags behind. As we move through our lives, our workaday habits, we trail our ghostly wakes.”

— Olivia Hawker

44. “The Lord does not make men do evil things to one another. But the Lord gave us the right to choose. Whether we do good or evil, it is our own decision and our own responsibility.”

— Olivia Hawker

45. “Pirates. We are Widerstand – resistance – you and I. No force can silence us, unless we permit silence. I prefer to roar.”

— Olivia Hawker

46. “She knows in her heart that resistance is right, even if it is dangerous.”

— Olivia Hawker

47. “There the seeds would dream through winter till the season of sowing came again.”

— Olivia Hawker

48. “Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry.”

— Olivia Hawker

49. “Ardennes. Now Bastogne is surrounded, and Germany’s recapture.”

— Olivia Hawker

50. “What seemed an individual, whole and distinct, was tied inextricably to its neighbors.”

— Olivia Hawker