Who spit in your porridge?
There are some nights when you just want to know there’s someone else besides you in this wide world.
History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.
You don’t make peace only with G-d. You make it with people. Sin isn’t global. It’s personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him.
Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.
Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.
The best thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task to start over.
It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.
It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.
People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don’t, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?
If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn’t someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning?
Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.
I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.
Religion isn’t in your DNA. you don’t believe just because your parents believe.
Power isn’t about doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.
The reason I am still sitting at Josef’s kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck- you want to see the damage; you can’t let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.
My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.
There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.
What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn’t the only word that fails. Hate does, too.
Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.