If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life --- mine or that of my fellow man --- is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?

But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than 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. (vi)

No human being is illegal.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

I developed an anger at [Moses] Mendelssohn. Later, I read the book. I realized there was nothing subversive in it.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

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