The dissolution of a family, global crisis creates the massive fracture, not only in the Middle East but between America and Israel, between Europe and Israel, between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The distances seem to be widening wherever you look.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.