“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?”

“Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one's life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open ; and so we kept our compass pointed forward. [p. 286]”

“Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.”

“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.”

“In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.”

“...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.”

“I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory”