“They fought like champions.For a minute.Just when it was getting interesting, both boys were hauled away their collars. A watchful parent.”

“There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it - when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were.”

“On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down....Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each would that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.I took them all away, and if there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away.Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye.They ere French, they were Jews, and they were you.”

“...they watched the humans disappear. They watched them dissolve, like moving tablets in the humid air.”

“Did you learn?"The face in the corner watched the flames. "I did." There was a considerable pause. "Until I was nine. At that age, my mother sold the music studio and stopped teaching. SHe kept only the one instrument but gave up on me not long after I resisted the learning. I was foolish.""No," Papa said. "You were a boy.”

“Even enemies were an inch away from friendship.”

“The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”