Salt to the Sea Quotes

“I moved from body to body, treating blisters, wounds, frostbite. But I had no treatment for what plagued people most the most. Fear.”

“Fear is a hunter. But brave warriors, we brush away fear with a flick of the wrist. We laugh in the face of fear, kick it like a stone across the street.”

“I was sick of it. Sick of hearing the phrase German Only. Could we really turn our backs on innocent homeless children? They were victims, not soldiers.”

“Guilt is a hunter. My conscience mocked me, picking fights like a petulant child. It’s all your fault, the voice whispered.”

“I had agreed with Mother to look to the future, but secretly I dreamed of returning to the past.”

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”

“Joana still had her mother. Reuniting with her mother was her motivation. She would slay dragons to get to her. Mother was anchor. Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean.”

“What a group we were. A pregnant girl in love, a kindly shoemaker, an orphan boy, a blind girl, and a giantess who complained that everyone was in her way when she herself took up the most room. And me, a lonely girl who missed her family and begged for a second chance.”

“Everything was filthy. Especially my conscience.”

“It could have been so easy. I could have walked across the ice myself, without the burden of the group. They could have tried to save the blind girl. Maybe they all would have drowned in the process. That would have been so much easier. And so much harder.”

“Joana Vilkas, your daughter, your sister. She is salt to the sea.”

″‘No, son,’ pleaded my father. ‘Not a traitor to your country. Much worse. A traitor to your soul.‘”

“I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

“Survival had its price: guilt.”

“I thought of the countless refugees trekking toward freedom. How many millions of people had lost their home and family during the war?”

“But, Eva, dear, your shoes are carrying your most valuable possession-your life.”

“The Nazis couldn’t stop the wind and the snow. The Russians couldn’t take the sun or the stars.”

“What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”

“My body begged for sleep but my mind warned me not to trust these people.”

“All the running, the hiding, the lies, the killing, for what? The endless circle of revenge: answering pain by inflicting pain. Why did I do it?”