“Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.”

“The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”

“Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.”

“The living take a part of the dead with them, carrying them around in their minds, like a song that lingers after the music has been turned off.”

“Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.”

“There are no little things. Little things are the hinges of the universe.”

“This was her special time, this early part of the day when the sun was just about to creep over the horizon. It was a brand new day in which anything could happen.”