but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.

For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.

As for me, I believe that if there's a God - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

You can't out-travel sadness. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.