I returned to Jerusalem, and it is by virtue of Jerusalem that I have written all that God has put into my heart and into my pen.

Our days on earth are like a shadow, and the time of our affliction is the length of our days.

After all my possessions had been burned, God gave me the wisdom to return to Jerusalem.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

For myself, I am very small indeed in my own eyes.

I belong to the tribe of Levi.

The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.