Kate Quinn

A Novel

The Huntress

Holly 

There weren't gaps in photographs; there wasn't any need to fill them up with stories. If she had a camera, she didn't need to tell stories; she could tell the truth.

“Revolutions talk big about women being the same as men," Nina said. “Now when you ask permission to join up, they tell you to go be a nurse.”

Stop. lan gave the fear a brutal kick. There is no parachute fall. No bloody nightmare either, because you have no right to it. You were just a journalist. A goddamn writer, not a soldier. They carried guns; you carried pens. They fought, you didn't. They bled and died, you wrote and lived. You haven't earned the nightmares.

“ We don't hunt the helpless, luchik. We hunt the killers. Is like villagers going after a wolf gone mad. Only when the wolf is dead, villagers go home and we find the next mad wolf. Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just" She mimed an explosion. "Is too much for them; they come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can't stop, not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. Is a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die." 

Tony linked his hands between his knees, smile fading o something more pensive. “An interpreter tries to work a step removed. You’re not really there, in a way. You're like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other. And that's everything, when you come down to it. That's it, in a nutshell: if people would just bear each other -“

Tony stopped. "They'd what?" Jordan asked quietly. 

He gave a small, crooked smile. “Likely go right on killing each other in swaths.”

No one likes to talk about their war, after it's fought. They want to forget. And what happens when they die, and they've taken all their memories with them? We’ve lost it all. And we can’t.

“You know why I prefer pictures to words?" Jordan asked Tony instead. “People can't ignore them. Most find it easier to forget the things they read than the things they see. What's caught on flm is there, it's what is. That's what makes pictures so wonderful, and so devastating. Catch someone or something at the right moment, you can learn everything about them. That's why I want to record everything I see. The beautiful, the ugly. The horrors, the dreams. All of It as much as I can get a lens in front of.”

Building a generation is like building a wall-one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time. Enough good bricks, you have a good wall. Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.

The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin. 

The Huntress quotes

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