What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.

Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.

[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)