I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time." Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

People who want to find a place of rest, want to find an integrated personality, sense of self, want fewer fractures in their lives.

People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.