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Famous Emma Richler Quotes

“Hell! His beard grows fast as blazes, like a damp wicket in springtime sun, green, and Rachel's skin is so fine, his bristles can score her red the way a new ball marks a bat, English alum on English unbleached willow, finest quality, special selection, Rachel-grade. Zach, my man, you have cricket on the brain! Thomas has asked him to play on Sunday. Bring Rachel, he said. Thomas 'All Souls' Aubry, gentleman, corinthian at heart, and half French yet more English than a true-born.”

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“Returning to bed, Rachel strokes Zachariah's black curls as he drifts into sleep and appreciates the shape and fractal geometry there, the self-similarity and infinity of scale. She breathes in at his scalp, then presses her ear to his, listening for the clamour of voices within, to the long line of fighting men who made him, his head a seashell. There is a template for the fighting man. Rachel listens across three times nine countries, as the fairy-tale saying goes, across three times nine countries in the thirtieth tsardom . . .”

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“Rachel slips off the bed and stands before him to rearrange his collar, aware that in this small gesture there is a quality acutely other than motherly, sisterly, companionable, and that, in this moment, everything ever intended for her, for them, has begun, that the beginning is in the rearrangement of his collar and not the first kiss they share now, Zach recovering his wind as quickly as he lost it, a Great Northern Diver resurfacing. Zach clasps his hands round her ears, steps into her body and breathes the very air from her lungs. His teeth scrape against hers and he rests his open mouth against her face, gasping for air, his eyes squeezed shut as in great pain. And Rachel and Zachariah are born. Now truly they are born. 'Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel. 'My fighting man.”

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“She pursued his lips,' Zach laughs. 'Another one I misread! Pursued for "pursed." You know. She pursed her lips. So whenever you do that now, reach out and touch my lips to shut me up? I think, she pursued his lips.' 'That's so silly,' smiles Rachel. 'I know that. Now I'm pursuing your lips,' he adds. When Zach kisses her, Rachel is often aware of the pulse in his lower labial, a small heartbeat there. She is aware of a pulsing and a slight thickening of tissue. How many times has this boy bled from his mouth? How many times.”

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“Marry me, Rachel.' 'Not yet.' 'Tomorrow, Rachel. Marry me.' 'Maybe tomorrow.' 'There is no common blood between us. Say it,' pleads Zachariah. 'There is no common blood between us,' murmurs Rachel. 'I am not your brother.' 'I know.' He traces her face with his swollen fingers, across the brow bones and down the zygomatics, and along the jaw from earlobe to chin, sweeping away the brine as he goes. 'I am your Wolff,' he says. 'And I am your Wolff,' she replies. Let the day begin.”

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“Zach's eyelids flutter and droop, his mind a pleasant jumble—things said tonight, last year, last month, things said in dreams. He sees Lev, Tasha, Rachel, and something he read earlier, what was it? In one of Rachel's books, circled in pen, a book of Natural History. 'Many birds and mammals, wolves in particular, have a—' What? Oh yes. '—a fateful preference for the ancestral nesting place.' And Rachel wrote in the margin: 'Ha ha ha! It has a strange attraction!”

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“What I was really thinking,' resumes Rachel, 'is—well, that there's fate, you see. I don't dismiss it, I don't think it's idiotic. It's quite scientific, actually. What we become. Who we—meet, end up with,' she continues, flames in her cheeks. 'You think we would have met, no matter what? Even if I were some lushy? Some loon? Street kid?' 'You're laughing at me.' 'Just asking,' he says. 'Everyone has one person, I think. For life. That's all.”

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“I need to tell you a story.' What about? Zachariah, Zachariah, my foundling boy. 'A boy. A boxer, a fighting man. A brother. No. About brothers, sisters. Foundlings, laid-in-the-streets. Fights, fighting. A boy, it all begins with the boy. My love. A wolf. Peter and the Wolf! Oh dear! I am very crazy! Let me—I must tell you this story.' Why? 'I'm frightened.' Of? 'Fractals. Patterns.' Ah, says the fish, looking at Rachel with his wise eyes. Chaos! 'Yes,' thinks Rachel. 'Chaos. Fearful symmetry.' Go home, says the fish, flipping over, flashing in light, and diving down into the great blue sea.”

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“He has come back from the verge of nevermore and is changed forever, and not just for the new bumps and scars upon his young head, bumps with a story to tell. I am a boxer! Yes, Sam has a calling now and a destiny and, day by day, gains in fortitude and definition, further moved to emotion by his bosom friends and further restored to vigour in thew and sinew.”

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“There are times today when Rachel looks at Zach and sees an effusion, she sees him in colours of yellow and blue, sun and sky. She sees the yellow crew-neck jumper and blue jeans the boy of eight years old appeared in the day he came to Chelsea from the Coram Family via the two or three previous fosterers who returned him there, defeated, pronouncing him uncommunicative and maladroit in the extreme, animal, said one; unruly. So why this boy? For Katya the fractious? Of all the orphan boys in the world, why him? Of all potential mothers, why Katya? What did she see? Everyone has a part and a destiny. Rachel remembers the yellow jumper the boy rarely removed, even after the family shopping spree for a new wardrobe at Harrods followed by lunch in a restaurant with napkins large as small tablecloths, and heavy cutlery and wine for Katya and Lev and a pervasive daunting hush. Zach had never been to a restaurant before and chose spaghetti, because he knew what it was. He ate it with knife and fork. On the day he arrived in Chelsea, he stopped in the vestibule to slip his feet from lace-ups without undoing the bows, removing his shoes with institutional efficiency, left hand still held in Katya's right. Rachel sees that boy still, blue and yellow. Sky and sun.”

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“We'll be up in a minute,' states Katya, speaking from a particular stillness, in sudden recognition of a dream made real, a dream annulled, so she had thought, by long words of the womb—'endometriosis,' 'hyperplasia'—and now made true, this vision of a boy on a staircase answering to his name, coming to her call. My son. She raises one arm slightly in front of Lev at her side, in gentle impediment. Not yet. Wait here. Let me see. This was always preordained.”

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“I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic.”

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“When Rachel asks him about days before his life as a Wolff, he will scowl and fidget and so she learns to wait for his recollections and, because it is so difficult for him, she will listen without speaking, collecting the pieces of his past painstakingly like a jigsaw maker, or a batsman accumulating runs, in awe of the impossible distance between a sliver of blue and a great sky, between three runs and a century, between a shard of memory and memory itself.”

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“You know how there are words that never really—they are never really quite right. You can't quite trust them. Use them. You know. Without pause.' 'There are words I stare at,' Zach says. 'Strange. Every time. Misled, that's one. I see mizzled. And unshed. I read unched.' 'Me too! But that's a different thing—except, now you mention it, it's odd about unshed, that it's only for tears. Mostly. Hardly ever blood, for instance, you don't see unshed blood. Unched. Not really.' 'Not in my case anyway. Mine sheds all over the joint! I'm a bleeder all right.”

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“Why so sad?" Zach queries in fairy-tale tones. "Rachel?" "O my brother Ivanushka," she recites. "A heavy stone is round my throat, silken grass grows through my fingers, yellow sand lies on my breast." "That's perishing gloomy," Zach remarks. "It ends happily though. Gracious! Everything sounds depressing this morning," adds Rachel. "There's a teacher at my school, she's very young, but she goes, Gracious! Just like a dowager. Makes me laugh. Except this morning. I can't help it. I am too depressed. I hate those voices so much. In the Gardens." "Stop listening," Zach scolds and put his hands in her hair—silken grass grows through his fingers.”

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