Abraham is trying to obey God, but not to kill. I feel that moment is one of the defining moments of Jewish faith.

I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.

My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I'm doing. I don't innovate anything. I'm just repeating.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)

It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.