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

I believe marriage is a spectator sport.

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

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.

After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything’s changed….there’s a hole. It’s person-shaped and it follows you everywhere…. For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable.

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