“He had the same look on his face that I had every day when I looked in the mirror. He was nothing more than a shell of a person.”

“One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

“The love in his eyes was so powerful, I needed to look away. Seth had an amazing grasp of the English language, but there were days when that skill was nothing compared to what he told me in his looks.”

“I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.”

“I understood now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he is.”

“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”