All quotations included/adapted in the novel are cited here and quoted in their original form.
p. 24“(Closing time was 4 a.m., when everybody went around to Reuben’s, the people who invented the sandwich, on East 58th Street, just off Fifth, with the after-hours crowd, or up to Harlem.)”
—Lisa E. Davis. “The Butch as Drag Artiste: Greenwich Village in the Roaring Forties” in The Persistent Desire; a Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle. Alyson Publications, 1992.
p. 26“Now Tevye might condone modern love, […] he might even shrug his shoulders at revolution with its crazy “what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours” but he will never condone apostasy […] For the essence of Tevye is his religion, it is his chief raison d’etre, the condition of his survival; and if he condoned his daughter’s apostasy, he would become something very much less than Tevye…”
—Frances Butwin. “Introduction” to Tevye’s Daughters by Sholom Aleichem, translated by Frances Butwin. Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1973.
p. 33“She lives in the hope that very soon the pot will boil over, as they say, the sun will rise and everything become bright. He will be set free along with many others like him, and then, she says, they will all roll up their sleeves and get to work to turn the world upside down.
—Sholom Aleichem. “Chava” in Tevye’s Daughters, translated by Frances Butwin. Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1973.
p. 104“A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats. “The Second Coming”
p. 136-137“Now the butch reaches into her breast pocket and pulls out a half-full soft pack of Camels. She gives it a sharp flick of the wrist, and two cigarettes shoot out of the pack a half inch and a quarter inch respectively. Raising the pack slowly to her mouth, the butch takes the end of the longer cigarette between her lips and pulls it free. She tucks the pack back into her breast pocket, then pulls her zippo from her hip pocket. She crooks her elbow, raising the lighter. Slowly, deliberately, she flicks open the lid so that it rings,” and “The butch spreads her legs, balancing her weight on the balls of her feet. She holds the comb ready to her hair, the fingers of her other hand extended, ready to smooth stray ends if necessary. She leans over to the side, bending away from the side she will be combing, tilting her head toward the comb. Her elbows jut until they are almost horizontal. She squints, concentrates, and then she lowers the comb. She will not comb her hair just yet—there is something more she wishes to do to show off.”
—Merril Mushroom. “How the Butch Does it: 1959” in The Persistent Desire; a Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle. Alyson Publications, 1992.