Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.

Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.

I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.