“I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.”

“I was just rather fascinated by certain what seemed to me insoluble paradoxes about reflection, about what it was like to look in one direction and see in another. I was struck by the strange capability we have to look through the front window of a motor car and at the same time look through the driving mirror and not to confuse the view that one saw inside one frame with the view that surrounded it in another frame.”

“a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected.”

“You could fill an airlift to Africa with all the food generated by one dead Jew.”

“The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine someone telling a story about “The Good Nazi.” The Jews and Samaritans hated one another.”

“It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.”

“JEWS HAVE SIX SENSESTouch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”