Top 60 Rachel Kadish Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.”

— Rachel Kadish

2. “Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”

— Rachel Kadish

3. “Even motionless, she was decisive.”

— Rachel Kadish

4. “People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.”

— Rachel Kadish

5. “I understand why we sleep. To slip the knot of the world.”

— Rachel Kadish

6. “The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation – infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?”

— Rachel Kadish

7. “Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.”

— Rachel Kadish

8. “A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safe pastures. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him.”

— Rachel Kadish

9. “A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.”

— Rachel Kadish

10. “She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.”

— Rachel Kadish

11. “The story that had once singed and flared in her had long since receded, as her habit of silence turned, over the decades, into law. Did she mean to take it to the grave with her, then? Plainly, that was what she was going to do. She was going to take it to the grave. And it would end there. Dust.”

— Rachel Kadish

12. “If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you’ll carry on your shoulders the weight of a thousand wives’ wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.”

— Rachel Kadish

13. “She’d spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.”

— Rachel Kadish

14. “He’d always pitied those ensnared in the time periods he studied – people captured in resin, their fates sealed by their inability to see what was coming. The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time – and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons.”

— Rachel Kadish

15. “Indeed, for the first time in her life she almost could see her heart, and to her astonishment it seemed a brave and hopeful thing: a small wooden cup of some golden liquid, brimming until it spilled over all...”

— Rachel Kadish

16. “For every loyalty, whether to self or community, does impose a blindness, and each love does threaten to blur vision, as few can bear to see truth if it harm that which is dear to us.”

— Rachel Kadish

17. “The greatest act of love – indeed, the only religion she could comprehend – was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.”

— Rachel Kadish

18. “I’m an ivy twined so long against a tower of strange design that I cannot now assume any other shape.”

— Rachel Kadish

19. “The greatest act of love – indeed, the only religion she could comprehend – was to speak the truth about the world.”

— Rachel Kadish

20. “A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.”

— Rachel Kadish

21. “You’re American,” she said simply. “You think straightforwardness is a virtue.”

— Rachel Kadish

22. “Sentiment would undo her – each of its ties were a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior – gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness – turned to shackles.”

— Rachel Kadish

23. “Do you wonder, ever,” said Ester quietly, “whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we’re determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?”

— Rachel Kadish

24. “More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month? Her hours of night reading seemed to grow ever more necessary, for each day’s study compelled her to explore these volumes further, and with a fierce attention impossible when others were about.”

— Rachel Kadish

25. “That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?”

— Rachel Kadish

26. “The distances between things are vast,” he said. “They are vast.”

— Rachel Kadish

27. “You have a beauty of a sort,” he said. “But more important than that, you have enough manly strength in you to match me.”

— Rachel Kadish

28. “The request had been impossible to refuse, delivered as it was in Darcy’s perennial air of wry cheer – a demeanor Aaron was certain was tattooed onto the English genome, right beside wry despair.”

— Rachel Kadish

29. “She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.”

— Rachel Kadish

30. “Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn’t care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself – or not give yourself – of your free will.”

— Rachel Kadish

31. “What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.” The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.”

— Rachel Kadish

32. “Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she’d been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman’s existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.”

— Rachel Kadish

33. “Love isn’t rest. Love requires you, from time to time, to rip up your soul and replant it. To dare your lover to do the same. To muster sympathy where it seemed impossible. To be, perpetually, two kids joining hands, drawing breath, and deep diving.”

— Rachel Kadish

34. “Do you hear the argument the other side makes?”

— Rachel Kadish

35. “There’s a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you’ve put history.”

— Rachel Kadish

36. “And a reminder too of the sole faith that still offered her a semblance of comfort – the faith that history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.”

— Rachel Kadish

37. “Then it was only right that she do as her spirit told her, and let the struggle itself answer the question of which was the stronger: her will or her womanly nature.”

— Rachel Kadish

38. “And because history cared not at all if the negligent left its missives unread, she insisted on caring.”

— Rachel Kadish

39. “I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub’s windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, “How do you think people get strong?”

— Rachel Kadish

40. “The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both.”

— Rachel Kadish

41. “For love does not set shackles, nor entrap.”

— Rachel Kadish

42. “The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time – and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons. Studying history had given him the illusion of observing safely from outside the trap. Only that’s what the world was: a trap. The circumstances you were born to, the situations you found yourself in – to dodge that fray was impossible. And what you did within it was your life.”

— Rachel Kadish

43. “Do not succumb to darkness. Lack of hope, as I learned long ago, is a deadly affliction. And in one so highly regarded as you, it is not merely a blight on one precious soul, but a contagion that may leave many in darkness. Recall that the light you bear, though it may flicker, yet illuminates the path for our people. Bear it. For in this world there is no alternative.”

— Rachel Kadish

44. “If a Jew tell a lie because the truth of his faith cannot be tolerated by those around him, shouldn’t one then prosecute the world rather than the Jew?”

— Rachel Kadish

45. “The words of prayer are like birds, Ester,” he said gently. “They soar.”

— Rachel Kadish

46. “Much as I detest the man, I’ll never know the full circumstances behind his choices. Life is muddy. Denying that – thinking there’s only one noble path above the fray – can be a poisonous approach to life.”

— Rachel Kadish

47. “Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.”

— Rachel Kadish

48. “The imperative – she whispered it to herself – to live. The universe was ruled by a force, and the force was life, and life, and life – a pulsing, commanding law of its own.”

— Rachel Kadish

49. “My grandmother,” Ester said, “wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny...”

— Rachel Kadish

50. “Two walls have dropped from between us: pride and justice. It no longer matters who was right. The Hippocratic oath has no place here – do no harm is the wrong standard for love. Everyone does harm.”

— Rachel Kadish