Ida Fink Quotes

Tiny drops of moisture bead up on her forehead. She wipes them off with the back of her hand and with this gesture seems to wipe away the thoughts that torment her, because once again she smiles and says, "Did you ever see someone who was killed in the war but who is still alive?"

Some questions should not even be thought. The facts alone suffice.

...everybody thinks I'm crazy, but I'm not. I know-every crazy person says that, but really, there's nothing wrong with my head. If only God would make me crazy! It's my heart that's sick, not my head, and there's no cure for that. ("Crazy")

He had that horrifying clarity of vision that comes just before death.

The death of Tsaritsa would have remained one of a million anonymous deaths were it not for the fact that it happened on a beautiful, mild day. (I've only imagined that the day was mild; much of what I'm going to say-but only the details, not the event itself-is the product of my imagination.) It happened in the very early evening, when the trees cast long shadows and the air was saturated with a light blue haze that was growing deeper and darker by the minute, although it was still long before nightfall. Tsaritsa's death happened at just the hour best suited for strolling, the hour that lures people onto the streets after a hard day's work. (first lines of "The Death of Tsaritsa")

Father called us to his office, to the animated Mrs. Kasinska, who, once the price was agreed on, promised to make Kennkarten for us so we could be saved, so we would not be killed. ("The Garden that Floated Away")

The only things we didn't discuss were the things that mattered most. Those we circled around, avoided, pushed away. (p135)

The man made a small chink for himself in the outside wall of the barn; through this chink he could keep an eye on a scrap of the world: the meadow in front of the peasant's fenced-in yard and a strip of road.

It was near the end. They had already shot my sons and my husband. I remember that people were saying, 'How can she do it? Why should she save herself? For whom?' But you know, the life force has such strong roots, you can't tear it out. Even after those we love most have died. But you are young, what do you know about that? ("The Other Shore")

September came, and with it the war; the radio spoke a strange new language of exhortations and abbreviations.

Later she used to say: The place where everything almost ended. She meant the long, gray stone building on the circular plaza planted with trees. But why that place? After all, there were other places equally, if not more deserving of that description. And yet, thirty years later, it was that place she went to see, only that one place. (p226)

She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit.

Our fate suddenly came to a halt and hung there for a moment, suspended over the abyss it had been racing toward, hung there for a few minutes (five? six?) and then, just as suddenly, turned...This was why I had come here, just for that moment at the crossroads, that sudden turn, that circus trick performed by our fate. (p248-9)

None of us had actually been thinking about a journey at the moment when it really began; and yet that moment was accompanied by the hollow rumbling of wheels and the whistle of a locomotive piercing the silence of the night. (p5)

It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of the trees and flowers was magnificent. We couldn't hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying-just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken. ("Jean-Christophe")