Sophie's Choice Quotes

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after-years, no matter how genuine.

I had a choice: Follow my heart or don’t break his. I think in the end I broke a bit of both our hearts.

Let your love flow out on all living things.

I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.

The right choice sometimes isn’t easy, Sophie. But that doesn’t mean it’s not right.

She was in love with you,” he says. “And I don’t think she got to tell you, did she?” My heart lurches, seizes inside my chest, fluttering to life at the words I’ve always wanted to hear. I shake my head. Tears spill down my cheeks. “She loved you. She wanted to be with you. That’s why she told me about herself. She said she’d made her choice. It was you. I think it was always you.

Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.

I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.

Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.

Every choice sets the table. Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences

On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible: From Darkness Visible, William Styron "It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia, wholly unknown to normal life.

Nevertheless we are free individuals, and this freedom condemns us to make choices throughout our lives. There are no eternal values or norms we can adhere to, which makes our choices even more significant. Because we are totally responsible for everything we do. Sartre emphasized that man must never disclaim the responsibility for his actions. Nor can we avoid the responsibility of making our own choices on the grounds that we "must" go to work, or we "must" live up to certain middle-class expectations regarding how we should live. Those who thus slip into the anonymous masses will never be other than members of the impersonal flock, having fled from themselves into self-deception. On the other hand our freedom obliges us to make something of ourselves, to live "authentically" or "truly".

Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary.

One heart, one mind, one soul. What is joined by choice can never be torn apart. You're mine, and I'm yours. Yesterday, today, and forever.

An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...

I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would

Why? As much fun as a hospital sounds, I'd rather spend the evening dancing with an amazing, smart, funny, interesting, beautiful girl who has the most incredible green eyes I've ever seen. Sophie, will you go to the dance with me?

he never allowed himself to think about unpleasant things, which answered very well, and could be supported in times of really inescapable stress by his genius for persuading himself that any disagreeable necessity forced upon him by his own folly, or his son's overriding will, was the outcome of his own choice and wise decision.

The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?

real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Beyond

..bet gal nedera vienos meilės lyginti su kita

Don’t you ever believe that, Mara. This is what gives us power: we always have a choice.

This was not judgment day—only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

...her father finds being called a Holocaust surviver demeaning. 'When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz -- the Holocaust is not just about that,' she said. 'It's about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.' Her father made much the same point in the film. 'People talk about Sophie's Choice as if it was a rare event,' he said. 'It wasn't. Everybody had to make Sophie's Choice -- all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don't think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.

I hesitate a moment. Wearing his dressing gown seems a bit cutesy. A bit Let me put on your great big manly shirt and allow the sleeves to flap endearingly around my fingers. But I have no choice.

And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God -- the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn't all that bad. And it was really God's fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I'll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!

I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama

the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do

greed is not a racial but a human prediliction and

I’m tired of chasing affection. I’m worth more than that. I may be young, but I know what I want. I want someone who’s willing to give up everything for me. And I deserve someone who’s proud to be with me instead of being ashamed of their feelings.” “I’m not going to be the lost puppy chasing someone around and begging for attention. I’m going to take some time and figure out what I want to do next, but until I know my next move, I’m done being a burden.” “Sophie—” “It’s not your fault, Bruce. It’s been like this my whole life. I’m just tired of being a second choice.

To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.

Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?' And the answer: 'Where was man?

Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—“unearned unhappiness!

Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

I’ve seen all those movies, of course. Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Sophie’s Choice. And I’ve watched a few documentaries and read a few books. But you don’t really get a sense of it until you’re actually there, do you? Have you ever been, Mrs F.?’ I said nothing.

For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window. She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs. Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

Sophie Bach from The Maker: You’re a human being with a personality and a will, and you make choices and think and create. Is there no meaning to you, Adrien Bach? And what about us? Is the way we feel about each other just simulated emotions from some biological process—nothing more?

His finger floated across her cheek to her temple, and then from there traced her eyebrow, ruffling the soft hairs as it moved to the bridge of her nose. “So pretty,” he said softly, “like a storybook fairy. Sometimes I think you couldn’t possibly be real.” Her only reply was a quickening of breath. “I think I’m going to kiss you,” he whispered. “You think?” “I think I have to kiss you,” he said, looking as if he couldn’t quite believe his own words. “It’s rather like breathing. One doesn’t have much choice in the matter.” Benedict’s kiss was achingly tender. -Benedict & Sophie

I don't know what you want from me then,' she cried, casting out her arms. 'For I cannot make my situation any different. I must marry. And so far, I have no promises.' He would not look at her. 'Ask me then,' she said, voice raw, 'ask me if I should like, if I should want to marry Pemberton, were the choice only about me?' He looked up. 'Would you?' 'No,' she said, voice cracking. 'Now ask me, whether I should still love you, were the choice only mine to make?' He took a step forward. 'Would you?' he said again. 'Yes,' she confessed. 'I will always choose my sisters. I will choose their need more than my want every day. But I want you just as much as I need money. You see me, in my entirety - the worst and the best of me - as no one else ever has.

It’s not fair.” She folded her arms across her chest and pushed out her lower lip. “Why did God give us free will anyway? Everybody just gets in trouble.” “Not always. Think of all the good choices people make.” “But it’s not fair that someone gets hurt because a person makes a bad choice.” “I know. But don’t forget that sometimes we’re the ones who make choices that hurt someone else.” Kurt felt the sting of his own words and wondered if Emily noticed. “I’d still prefer having choices to being a puppet, wouldn’t you?” “I guess so.

In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery.

Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again?

O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles...

What causes human beings to inflict upon themselves these stupid little scissor snips of unhappy remembrance?

Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed.

Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed.

She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—

the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.

there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He

If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.

Höss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed,

How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid

history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As

more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But

the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What

Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.

absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In

You’re better off driving your Hummer to go get a salad than driving your Prius to a barbecue.

I want him. Desperately. Even I simultaneously know that a lot of things I might want in life are not good choices.

I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?" "Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history.

counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially

It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning: Sophie and Nathan, yes, but also Jan and Eva -- Eva with her one-eyed mis -- and Eddie Farrell, and Bobby Weed, and my young black savior Artiste, and Maria Hunt, and Nat Turner, and Wanda Muck-Horch von Kretschmann, who were but a few of the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach; then I had no more tears to shed, I lowered myself to the sand...and slept...When I awoke it was nearly morning...I heard children chattering nearby. I stirred...Blessing my resurrection, I realized that the children had covered me with sand, protectively, and that I lay as safe as a mummy beneath this fine, enveloping overcoat.

Sophie Betsuie lost her composure and returned to the hogan, crying. She was beating herself up with a club made out of the words if only, and I knew what it felt like. If only I hadn’t done this. If only someone else hadn’t done that. I hoped she would learn sooner, rather than later, that you can’t unchoose anyone’s choices, least of all your own. All you can do with your past is try to grow out of it.

I was never raised to fall in love like this. Without reason or choice. Only wild, intense obsession. I never meant for this to happen. But now that it has, there’s no escaping. I belong to Dante. And he belongs to me.

Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie’s choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children.

You have two choices,” Sophie decided, placing her hands on her hips—even though most of her torso was under the mud, so the effect was somewhat muted. “You can wade in now on your own. Or I can have Sandor pick you up and toss you in.” “Everyone votes for option B, right?” Dex asked. The chorus of “yes” was definitely unanimous. “I hate all of you,” Stina informed them as Sandor stalked toward her with a smile that looked downright gleeful. “Fine. I’ll do it on my own—back off!” She moved to the edge of the mud again. And then she just stood there. “Ten seconds,” Sophie warned. “Then it’s Sandor dunk time! Ten… nine… eight…” Biana, Dex, and Wylie joined in the countdown as Stina made a noise that was part growl, part moaning whale. “Four… three…” Stina muttered a string of words that would’ve made Ro proud. Then she shuffled into the mud, trying to move slowly and carefully. But two steps in, she lost her footing and… SPLASH! “For the record,” Dex said as Stina burst back to the surface looking like a sludge beast and screaming like a banshee, “this might be the greatest moment of my life.

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death…I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.

He looked at her, a scared boy in a man-wolf's body. "I love you Sophie," he breathed. "I love everything about you. Even the terrible parts of you. They're as beautiful as the good parts. I knew from the moment I met you that I couldn't love anyone else. Not like I love you. I tried, Sophie. I tried to let you go. But love doesn't give you that choice. Not real love. At least you'll know now. That your story had a happy ending all along. That you had true love. Always.

Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a "liberal" fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians.

Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories.

As material beings we belong wholly to the natural world. We are therefore subject to causal relations. As such, we have no free will. But as rational beings we have a part in what Kant calls das Ding an sich -- that is, the world as it exists in itself, independent of our sensory impressions. Only when we follow our 'practical reason' -- which enables us to make moral choices -- do we exercise our free will, because when we conform to moral law, it is we who make the law we are conforming to.

... my choices still follow me. They are a part of me.' 'Only if you let them be. Yes, choices define your life, Soph, but you make new ones every single day. Life is a work in progress, and how we define it changes as we change, as our choices change.

Don’t get married until you’re forty. Live alone for as long as you can. Trust your gut and meditate if you are torn about what to do. The answer will always come to you and you’ll never regret it, because you’ll look back and know you made that choice with a clear mind.

I never knew it happened like that." I snap my gaze to her. "What?" "You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that." "It's not like that," I say quickly. "You could have fooled me." We're up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will's there, fighting laughter. "Nice," he says. "Glad I'm downcourt of you." I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. "Happy to amuse you." His smile slips then, and he's looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember...must recognize me on some level even though he can't understand it. "You want to go out?" he asks suddenly. I blink. "As in a date?" "Yes. That's what a guy usually means when he asks that question." Whistles blow. The guys and girls head in opposite directions. "Half-court scrimmage," Will mutters, looking unhappy as he watches the coaches toss out jerseys. "We'll talk later in study hall. Okay?" I nod, my chest uncomfortably tight, breath hard to catch. Seventh period. A few hours to decide whether to date a hunter. The choice should be easy, obvious, but already my head aches. I doubt anything will ever be easy for me again.

servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet

One of the things I cannnot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective," Steiner writes, "is the time relation." Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. "Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox-Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be-that I puzzle over time.

A mother in J Brand skinny jeans with an impeccably dressed daughter walks past, giving me the Mummy Once-over, and I flinch. Since I had Minnie, I’ve learned that the Mummy Once-over is even more savage than the Manhattan Once-over. In the Mummy Once-over, they don’t just assess and price your clothes to the nearest penny in one sweeping glance. Oh no. They also take in your child’s clothes, pram brand, nappy bag, snack choice and whether your child is ­ smiling, snotty or screaming. Which I know is a lot to take in, in a one-second glance, but believe me, mothers are multi-taskers.

they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.

I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach

It’s Miss Foster’s decision,” Mr. Forkle interrupted. Sophie snorted. “Right. Just like it was my decision the day you reset my abilities. I could either stay malfunctioning, or risk my life to fix everything—and bonus: It was the only way I’d be able to heal Prentice and Alden. That’s not much of a choice, is it?

After dinner yesterday, I went to the movies and saw Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. Hitler’s invasion of Poland only figured in the film. In the film, Meryl Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman, but then in a commuter train she meets this civil engineer played by Robert De Niro, and remarries. A pretty all-right movie.

Shouldn’t you go with someone who isn’t a walking interspeciesial disaster?” “Sophie is far from a disaster,” Grady argued, placing a reassuring hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “Yeah, the only disaster I see here is you,” Dex told Stina. “And let me guess. You think you’d be a better leader?” Stina laughed. “You think I want that kind of responsibility? Uh, yeah, hard pass. Wylie’s the obvious choice. He’s older, with more training and experience, and—” “Not necessarily,” Wylie interrupted. “Sophie may be younger, but she’s lived through more than all of us combined.” “Since when is ‘not dying’ a qualification for leadership?” Stina countered.

outrageously at his temples (by then his need to do something had become like a panic, a fierce drive up ward and outward from his self that had begun to cut like flame through the boozy dreamland, the nit-picking, the inertia, the navel-gazing), said loudly and impatiently: “What do you mean there is not a hope in the world?

But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence.

It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.

I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet “nigger lover,” which I am sure I am called already in private by many,

Musel jsem se dívat na průzory do plynových komor a sám sledovat proces smrti... Znovu a znovu se mě ptali, jak se já a moji lidé na tyto operace můžeme nepřetržitě dívat a jak jsme schopni to vydržet. Má stálá odpověď zněla, že je to otázka železného odhodlání, s jakým musíme plnit Hitlerovy rozkazy, a takové odhodlání že lze získat pouze potlačením všech lidských citů.

what. Content strategy asks these questions of stakeholders and clients: Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to accomplish, change, or encourage? How will we measure the success of this initiative and the content in it? What measurements of success or metrics do we need to monitor to know if we are successful? How will we ensure the web remains a priority? What do we need to change in resources, staffing, and budgets to maintain the value of communication within and from the organization? What are we trying to communicate? What's the hierarchy of that messaging? This isn't Sophie's Choice, but when you start prioritizing features on a homepage and allocating budget to your list of features and content needs, get ready to make some tough calls. What content types best meet the needs of our target audience and their changing, multiple contexts? What content types best fit the skills of our

And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for… far from my mind was any idea that Nathan might be disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. I regarded Nathan’s outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some aberration of mind.

I sometimes feel as if my puny brain is the battleground for all these battles. I can't remain aloof because there's no happiness for me in so doing, because there's no happiness without truth—and this war is essentially a war about truth. Every false throne must first crack and splinter, that's the distressing thing, before the genuine can appear in unadulterated form. I mean that personally and spiritually, not politically. I've been presented with a choice.

For most of your life, you are accustomed to a sense of your own importance; that the choices you make and the actions you perform have weight and consequence. You worry about a word misspoken or a decision rushed. You view other lives in relation to their significance and connection to you. Your parents, your children, your friends. You view your own life in relation to your successes and defeats. These are the things that matter. Winning a race, a fight, a war. Loving a partner or a cause. Saving a life or the planet. But when you think ‘planet’ you think ‘humans’. When you think about winning, you disregard the loss of others. When you think about love, you wonder who loves you back. Your worldview is selfish beyond your own survival, beyond your code. The universe revolves around you. One day you stand alone on a mountain or in a crater, and in that glimpse at the majesty of the sea or the eternity of the stars, in that moment when the telescope reverses, your sense of your unique self collapses and you carry the knowledge with you and you try never to forget. Have

We need to have a serious discussion about your leadership skills, Miss Foster,” Bronte’s sharp voice barked the next morning, jolting Sophie out of the dazed, half-sleepy state she’d been lingering in since sunrise. “And perhaps also about your strange choices for sleeping location.” Some part of her brain had been telling her that she needed to get up and get ready for a big day of super-important stuff. The other part had decided that all of that stuff could wait a tiny bit longer. And then a tiny bit longer after that. And a little more after that. As if she’d found some sort of strange mental snooze button—which she was happy to keep hitting as long as it let her stay surrounded by baby alicorns and Calla’s soothing songs instead of having to face reality. And now her entire brain was telling her that the best solution to her current situation was to pull her blankets over her head and wait for Bronte to go away.

That’s not fair,” Sophie grumbled through a yawn. “Yeah, wow,” Keefe said, rubbing his eyes as he stumbled to his feet. “If I don’t go now, I’m going to be drooling on your desk—unless you need me to stay.” Sophie couldn’t tell if he was asking her or her physicians. Either way, she told him, “Go home, Keefe. You’ve been stuck here long enough.” He shook his head, studying her with sleepy eyes. “I’m never stuck with you, Foster. Someday I’m going to make you see that.” “Sounds like I’d better get Hunkyhair home,” Ro said, striding out of Sophie’s closet in a silky pink gown that somehow looked both right and wrong with her armor strapped on top of it. “I was bored,” Ro added when she noticed the way everyone was staring, like that explained her new fashion choices. “I’ll bring the dress back tomorrow.” “Keep it,” Sophie told her. “You… look really good.” Ro glanced down, sliding her hands across the shimmering skirt, then rolled her eyes and muttered something about sparkles going to her head.

Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South—or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness—the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swampland, for example, with its look and feel of a murky savanna on the Carolina coast, or the Sunday hush on a muddy back street in a village of Galicia, where by only the smallest eyewink of the imagination one might see whisked to a lonesome crossroads hamlet in Arkansas these ramshackle, weather-bleached little houses, crookedly carpentered, set upon shrubless plots of clay where scrawny chickens fuss and peck—but in the spirit of the nation, her indwellingly ravaged and melancholy heart, tormented into its shape like that of the Old South out of adversity, penury and defeat.