We've sort of agreed that the account of Adam and Eve is a story.

I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.