“Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.”

“And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.”

“A caregiver is changed by the culture of illness, just as one is changed by the dynamic era in which one lives. For one thing, I don't have as much time in conversation with myself, and I feel the loss. Certainly I worry more about his death, and mine too, since I;m so much a part of the evolving saga of his health, which I have to monitor every day. But I've grown stronger in every aspect of my life. In small ways: speaking more directly with people. In large ways: discovering I can handle adversity and potential loss and yet keep going. I've a better idea of my strength. I feel like I've been tested, like a willow whipped around violently in a hurricane, but still stranding, its roots strong enough to hold. [p. 301]”

“Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul.”

“...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.”

“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”