Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.

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

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.