Best 73 quotes of Emma Richler on MyQuotes

A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity. In Zachariah, she sees infinity. Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale. There is a template for all things.

Ah, Sam, sighs Tom Spring to himself. These are your beginnings. And in your beginnings, my end! Oh how the recollections connect, each to each, as links in a chain!

And am I there?' 'Always. I'd say, always. You're everywhere, in all the dreams. Sometimes it's your face I dream, but not you. Not your personality, not you at all except for the face. And sometimes I know it's you, definitely you, but your face is a blur—or you're not a person, but a dog or—

And as he recalls the old soldier's wisdom regarding bullets and fate, how pointless evasion is when each shot has a man's name on it, he lurches upright, to the waist, a roaring sound in his ears.

Away from Lev, she craves his need for her. When with him, it enervates. Why is that? She cannot help it. Nothing to be done. Only with her sister is she unfettered. Tasha never makes her think about it, the terrible stature of love. Its shape, size, weight, the long shadows it casts. With Tasha she never goes cold as stones in a river, as Lev will accuse. You are suddenly so cold! Cold as stones in a river! What have I done wrong? he complains. Nothing. Nothing, my darling.

Be my wolf," she says. "I am your wolf," he replies, fighting for wind. Let the day begin.

But it's so silly, Mama!' pipes Zach, protesting with all the might of his twelve-year-old bellows and leaping to his feet, chest puffed, to fling a proprietary arm around his sister who fits so neatly in the crook of him, as if wrought for this place. He speaks for them both, though Rachel is some months his elder.

Did I ever tell you I was challenged to a duel once, when I was a student in Geneva?" "No!" Zach exclaims. "Fantastic! I'd love to fight a duel!

Even very great things, he meant, can't last forever. Or beautiful things, I suppose. Those too. Things that don't really need replacing except because they fall apart.

Every phrase Aleksei uttered in Raphael's sister's presence sounding like bells, he could not help it, everything he said, a declaration of love!

Everything is connected,' stated Rachel. 'Patterns everywhere.

Go home, Rachel. She so likes to to be there for his return. Zachariah is coming, Zachariah is coming! Rachel is all gravity now, nudged from dreams, a swift transition. Rachel dreams much and often. She is not hunted.

Hear me," she insists. "I shan't survive it, do you understand? If you get hurt. I shan't survive it.

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.

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.

Her cut finger has begun to bleed slightly and she licks the blood away. Salt, metal, black earth. Blood has such a tenebrous taste.

He rises off the bed and tries to speak, but cannot stop the pain in his throat, and cannot articulate a word, capable only of an animal sound, a strangulated wheeze that shocks him deeply, enraging him, this sudden loss of the faculty of speech that feels somehow bestial and low.

He wonders aloud at the origins of valentining. 'You're right,' Rachel says. 'It is a verb. Can be. And birds valentine each other, make mating calls. And usually mate in mid-February. You see?' 'But why Valentine?' asks Zach. 'Why valentining?' 'There were many Saint Valentines,' offers Tasha. 'I don't know what the link is between their martyrdom and love letters.' Zach is not very interested in the old tradition or the archaic verb. He is not bothered by the mating calls of passerines or the saints named Valentine and their associated symbols—he is merely fishing. Does Rachel think the tradition silly? If he were to send her a valentine, how strange would that be?

His mother, Zach explained, taught the Romantics and named her sons accordingly, extravagantly, tempting fate. She plays a terrible game of names. Thomas Love survives his beloved elder brother Percy Bysshe who died in a sailing accident. Percy Bysshe, buried at sea. The name and the man, a strange attractor. Everything is true.

Hopes are so very well constructed.

Hopes are so well constructed, so monstrously dashed!

How one can never truly leave. And never quite return. Do you understand?

How vast is my London! How strange my native place!

How very glad I am that the boy ran into my shop! See how it ends well! I play my part! Everyone has a part and a destiny, that's my perspective.

Aleksei with his impossible curls so very like her own, yet less seemly perhaps. Such hair is somewhat fairy-tale in a man. Poetic.

A wolf's sense of hearing is remarkably acute. A wolf can detect another's howl from as far as nineteen kilometres away.

Come and kiss me, my darling.

Every man has a part and a destiny, some stronger than others.

I do not understand you, I bang my head against you, but today I love you so much.

In a snow-white field near Moscow, I want you above all to hear how sad my living voice is.

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.

I love you so much. Loved you so much.

I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.

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.

Nicky knew so many beautiful things.

In London, Alexander knows, they like neither his sister nor himself. Society considers the Tsar silly and vain, a ballroom dancer with golden curls and a lorgnette up his sleeve, an aloof monarch who turns a deaf ear, as Napolean said of him at Erfurt, to anything he does not want to hear. In effect, when the Tsar turns an ear, it is only to favour the right, as he is quite deaf in the left. Yes, Alexander loves to dance, he is myopic, he turns a deaf ear. What of it?

Snow can sometimes fall from a cloudless sky.

It is perfectly scientific,' Lev protests, rising to draw the heavy dining room curtains against the streetlamp light, reducing it to a glow that bleeds amber round the edges and between the panels of plum brocade. Lev turns back into the room but stays by the window a moment to observe the new play of light, the chandelier casting shards of glitter upon mahogany and bold shadows across the high brow and long sharp plains of Katya's timeless face. Oh my wife.

What is the point of ducking?' says the old soldier to the young soldier. 'Each shot has a man's name on it anyway!' he laughs. 'Nothing you can do.

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.

Platov said that the burning of Moscow has changed the world forever, it has changed Russians forever, landowner and serf, officer and peasant, all souls, nobody will ever think the same again, and Aleksei tried to fathom it, irreversible change, but it was raining in his head, as that Prussian fellow at the next table kept moaning.

Rachel believes in it, the laws of of pattern formation and how they are universal: whatever she sees, crystallizing, a landscape of fractals, of emergence and symmetry, her world falling happily into shape where he must forge it, a pioneer of industry, sooty and scarred. For Rachel Wolff, quite simply, there are patterns everywhere, she can't help it; she is an illustrator, naturalist, cartographer—and her eye, a kaleidoscope.

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.

Remembrance is so physical!

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 . . .

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.

She loves him so much. He is her native place.

She watches her mother drink, then sits by her again before the picture window to watch the snow fall, watching closely until she can hear it. . . . Rachel listens to snow. And beyond snow.

. . . sitting up cross-legged and noting the light, how it fills the room in streams, etching out the shape of Zach recumbent, a bold coastline in a clarion sky. I drop anchor here, thinks Rachel. Anywhere here. You are my home, my horizon, my shore. How long is the coast of Britain?

Some days, Rachel thinks, there is rapture. Everything connects, everything is right and good and there is nothing troubling, not even in paradox. For instance, the tissues in her body renew themselves every two years, yet she remains Rachel.