When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.