“I remember his eyes. They are just like mine. Every time I look in the mirror I see him. I try not to look at my self too much.”

“Ida tried not to sigh.“What do you think of your husband?” he asked.“He was rather short,” Ida said without thinking. When Aubrey didn’t respond, she thought that maybe she ought to elaborate and she said, “And beardy.”That was as much as she could remember of him in the midst of the chaotic events. He was short, bearded, quiet. But mostly short.“He used to be an officer,” Aubrey said.“So I have been told,” Ida tried, again, to keep the cheek from her voice though she was quite certain that she was failing.“In the Varangian army,” Aubrey continued.She resisted the urge to comment on how she didn’t care.”

“Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly....Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.”

“Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.”

“There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.”

“The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else - men, guns, ammunition.”

“A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.”

“I know that everyone brings to the work his or her own experiences and background and may interpret the piece like a Rorschach in their own way.”

“I don’t care what other people think about me. Most people are idiots, and they can think whatever they want.”

“First love," said Ida with a sigh. "That's the one that kills you.”

“'Ida' is about humanity, about guilt and forgiveness. It's not a film that deals with an issue as such. It's more universal.”