We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?