Salt to the Sea Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

“Survival had its price: guilt.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything was filthy. Especially my conscience.”

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

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

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

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