Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference.

It's not a pretty world, Papa.' 'I've noticed,' my father said softly.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something.

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.