“For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold...”

“The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.”

“More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.”

“she poured herself into him wordlessly. Unable to stop, she emptied her very core into him, and yelled and sobbed and laughed and promised and begged, and explained why and why not, and why they must and why they couldn’t, and why there was no life without and how everything is always ripped in the same place and how she curses the moment and is resurrected over and over again endlessly.”

“How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? She thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way.”

“He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.”

“Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he’d felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.”