“I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“Were we praying, Forgive our oppressors for what they have done? Or, Forgive us for what has been done to us? Or, Forgive You for Your inscrutability?”

“I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, "and how can I get back? ”

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”

“Grandfather interrogates me about you every day. He desires to know if you forgive him for the things he told you about the war, and about Herschel. (You could alter it, Jonathan. For him, not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible.) He is not a bad person. He is a good person, alive ina bad time. Do you remember when he said this? Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed. For me, OK, but there are things that I want for little Igor. There is so much violence around him, and I mean more than merely the kind that occurs with fists. I do not want him to feel violence anymore, but also I do not want him to one day make others feel violence.I parrot: Grandfather is not a bad person, Jonathan. Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions. Grandfather is now dying because of his. I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.”

“When the pages are in the typewriter, I can't see his face.In that way i am choosing you over him.I don't need to see him.I don't need to know if he is looking up at me.It's not even that I trust him not to leave.I know this won't last.I'd rather be me than him.The words are coming so easily.The pages are coming easily.At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.He said, Let there be light.And there was darkness.”