The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.