Julie Orringer Quotes & Sayings

Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer." "What's it mean?" "The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones. — Julie Orringer

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust? — Julie Orringer

Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he'd been sick in Debrecen she'd taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he'd be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the tie when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father's orchard. — Julie Orringer

You will stay up all night reading this brilliant and devastating novel the way you might have with a new best friend in junior high-one whose revelations thrilled and terrified you, and whose raw, hard-earned wisdom remade the way you saw the world. It evokes the genius of Angela Pneumans canonical progenitors: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy. Lay It on My Heart is a gorgeous, riveting, and unforgettable book. — Julie Orringer

The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter. — Julie Orringer

I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera. — Julie Orringer

When he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. — Julie Orringer

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work. — Julie Orringer

This was what dying meant, Helena thought-everything that had been you,leaving. — Julie Orringer

Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn't care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. — Julie Orringer

Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate. — Julie Orringer

Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her — Julie Orringer

And what if I fail?" "Ah! Then you'll have a story to tell. — Julie Orringer

He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence. — Julie Orringer

What is left of a woman once her last five pounds are gone? — Julie Orringer

It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon. — Julie Orringer

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best. — Julie Orringer

He allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past. — Julie Orringer

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation. — Julie Orringer

Three hours later they watched the Ile de France slip out toward the flat blue distance of the open sea and sky. How astouding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand. How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic. — Julie Orringer

No one can hold all of me at once. Does this constitute a crime? — Julie Orringer

Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck — Julie Orringer

He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now - that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive. — Julie Orringer

Practice at hunger makes the fast easier. — Julie Orringer

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it — Julie Orringer

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself. — Julie Orringer

Life, oblivious to his grief, continued — Julie Orringer

I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another. — Julie Orringer

was pregnant, his father had written back — Julie Orringer

It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return. — Julie Orringer