Top 35 Sarah Blake Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is the crime and there is silence.”

— Sarah Blake

2. “A life can change in a single moment, and from there you simply move forward.”

— Sarah Blake

3. “I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young.”

— Sarah Blake

4. “No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day – in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.”

— Sarah Blake

5. “Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.”

— Sarah Blake

6. “And why just then, why that moment was the moment in which she understood quite suddenly her own death, she couldn’t say. Simply, she saw how he would miss her.”

— Sarah Blake

7. “Because people are people. Evie fixed her eyes on him. People have complicated lives. Lives that don’t necessarily fall so cleanly into black-and-white choices – people are blind, but still well-intended, and see as far as they can.”

— Sarah Blake

8. “Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between.”

— Sarah Blake

9. “But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you.”

— Sarah Blake

10. “Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.”

— Sarah Blake

11. “Time and quiet, everyone counseled, would help. Best not to mention it. Best not to dwell on it, his mother had said. It was a terrible accident. It must have been hot. Windows were open at the time. And time would heal. Somethings were better left unsaid.”

— Sarah Blake

12. “Nothing is inevitable; everything is tangential, particular – human.”

— Sarah Blake

13. “You’re just like the rest, only kind.”

— Sarah Blake

14. “He believed in the people on the ship, believed they could steer clear of what was wrong. That was the evil these days laid bare, surely – this sustained, precious belief that everyone could see it all clearly, the hope that someone would come to stop it, that there would be people who could stop it, doomed them instead.”

— Sarah Blake

15. “And when the man had touched his bow to the string, touched and then drawn the bow across, holding that long first note, Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one’s life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.”

— Sarah Blake

16. “How quickly the world plows us under, she thought with a pang. For two generations, maybe three, we lived on. After that, we’re nothing more than a name, or – her eye fell on one of Great-Aunt Minerva’s chairs standing like a sentry against the wall – a part of the furniture.”

— Sarah Blake

17. “We want to be deceived. There is bread again. There are jobs.”

— Sarah Blake

18. “That moment is the one we still repeat here, over and over again, the ordinary, everyday wickedness of turning away.”

— Sarah Blake

19. “What if a place could remember what had happened? What if a place could speak? What if that memory tripped us up in our daily lives?”

— Sarah Blake

20. “Ogden Moss Milton Nov. 11, 1899–Oct. 4, 1980 Katherine Milton May 4, 1905–Sept. 10, 1988 Ogden Moss Milton Jr. March 17, 1930–Aug. 22, 1959 Evelyn Milton Pratt April 18, 1937–March 24, 2017.”

— Sarah Blake

21. “America rose out of that handshake in Philadelphia, 1776. That single, simple deal. You give us your signatures to fight the British, we’ll give you your slaves. That is what’s at the bottom of the jar.”

— Sarah Blake

22. “Children there rowed boats, climbed trees, picked mussels, ending every summer day cleaned up and carrying the ice in the silver bucket, the Goldfish crackers, and the Scotch, down to the dock at six, where they’d stand ranged along the splintering wooden boards looking down at the white bodies of the flashing fish, while the grown-ups behind them drank as the sun fell into the sea. The Miltons of Crockett’s Island.”

— Sarah Blake

23. “Ghost stories belong to the middle-aged, thought it’s always the young who play the dramas.”

— Sarah Blake

24. “Every day something will happen, something new will come. And then, and then. She remembered this urgent push toward the next thing and the next.”

— Sarah Blake

25. “If there are places that hold us, keeping us in them, surely too there are people, he felt, people who work like mirrors for the selves we have forgotten.”

— Sarah Blake

26. “So know yourselves first,” she finished. “Then look back and account.”

— Sarah Blake

27. “The things that remain matter. Because of them, I can render a plausible life.”

— Sarah Blake

28. “Before the Holocaust,” Paul was explaining to Daryl now, “when someone tripped on a paving stone in the road, the folk saying went, A Jew must be buried there. So the stumble stones take the old folk saying.”

— Sarah Blake

29. “Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between. In the inexplicable, invisible turns – when someone puts a hand down, pushes open one particular gate, and steps through. A man saying no instead of yes, two hands grasped on a dark street.”

— Sarah Blake

30. “There was nothing to do and not enough time to do nothing in.”

— Sarah Blake

31. “The morning had started. Someone else was out there, threading the day into cloth.”

— Sarah Blake

32. “She badly wanted to go on in this room in the place where she knew precisely who she was, the edges firm, the corners strong.”

— Sarah Blake

33. “And Evie was the grown-up now. She was in the line of grown-ups behind the child.”

— Sarah Blake

34. “But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit yourself in it. You must see how – you must be vigilant.”

— Sarah Blake

35. “Oh, I am ridiculous. She smiled. Absurd.”

— Sarah Blake

36. “It won’t work.” Ogden shook his head. “Less than five percent of this country wants to raise the quotas.” “But these are refugees, not immigrants.” “These are Jews.” “Not all.”

— Sarah Blake

37. “The Mouse, she was nicknamed.”

— Sarah Blake

38. “Undismayed by the ordinary evil of the world, he had the place and the power to make good, to do good. And he did so. He believed one could do right. He had been raised to expect that one could. His was the last generation for whom those givens remained as undisturbed as a silk purse.”

— Sarah Blake

39. “Reg was black and Len was white, but together they were neither. Or rather, together they were both.”

— Sarah Blake