Fiftieth Gate Quotes Flashcards
Truth - blackness
“It always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory”
Repressed - force him
“I want to break the silence for him… to force him to look back”
Empathy - greandparents
“He scouls and I realise how deeply buried is his pain. I have always pitied myself for the grandparents I do not have, rarely considering my father’s own orphaned state. I identify him as a survivor - a parent with a tragic past - but not as parentless.”
Interplay - another time
“His eyes have refocused on my document, drawn to the letters that make up the sound of his father’s name, but his mind has travelled to another time and place, far from Melbourne, far from me.”
Impact - darkness
“I’m still scared of darkness…”
Repressed - sisters
“Marta and Yenta, his baby sisters of whom he never speaks as if their murder was intended to erase their memory from the earth.”
Impact - shmistory
“‘History, shmistory,’ she railed, ‘where will the past get you in life?’”
Empathy - disrepect
“I thought about it later, the arrogance of my request, the unintended disrespect. He was no longer a child, and his son, was inviting him to return to those days as if his childhood could be fixed.”
Interplay - deal
“This was the deal: I would give them my knowledge of history; they would give me their memory”
Interplay - dismisses
“…dismisses my efforts to extract facts from the past.”
Emotion - books
“You read, you read. Books, books, everywhere. But do you know how it feels?”
Interplay - remember more
“Does history remember more than memory?”
Objective - Jewish Council
“The Jewish Council in his town was neither good nor bad. It simply did what had to be done.”
Objective - number
“Prisoner Number 5503”
Interplay - throwing facts
“I share my discoveries with my parents, throwing fats into their stories based on documents drawn up under obsessive gaze of Polish overlords.”
