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.

My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.

I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days.

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.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

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.