To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

These are the moments for which we live.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.