So many humans.
So many colors.
They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts. (p.309)
People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of differences. (p.4)
How did you feel about the use of color in the book?
Can you see that this enemy has found its ways … and that clearly, I cannot stand up here alone and fight him?
Will you stand by as your leaders did in the past, when they gave your land to everybody else, when they sold your country for the price of a few signatures? Will you stand there, powerless? Or … will you climb up into this ring with me? (p.254)
What are the qualities that encourage and/or allow us to look for and participate in a losing fight?
A horizon of Nazi flags and uniforms rose upward, crippling her view every time she attempted to see over a smaller child’s head. It was pointless. The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through, or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire. (p.110)
Therein lay the problem. Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew. (p.211)
What does it take to put someone else’s safety ahead of your own and that of your family?