God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.