“He who gives life, nourishes life. He listens, this I can tell you. Whatever happens, He's listening. He doesn't always answer right away. He doesn't always say yes. But He's listening. This much I promise you.”

“Like most Eastern Europeans, he was not amenable to the socialist ethic so many Israeli leftists still romanticized, despite the proven failure of Communism to solve any of the world's problems and its unenviable success in inventing many new ones.”

“The most terrible thing about terrorism, the thing that people fond of saying "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" didn't get, was that even siding with the terrorists gave you no immunity. The terrorist never knew his victims, and didn't give a damn. When you sided with them, you were taking sides against yourself.”

“What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?”

“...this was the only answer she'd ever found to evil: to go on living and to help others live in happiness.”

“How do they manage to go on living?.....By loving life. And-in spite of everything-by loving God. By having enough faith to start over again and again; enough faith to risk having our hearts break all over again. That's the true meaning of faith. It's the deepest kind of heroism.”

“Elizabeth feared that because of her looks, she was doomed to meet men with unreasonably high self-images and no depth, the kind that dogged movie actresses and models. Men who were superficial to begin with, and existentially boring in that which they sought, and thus ultimately unsatisfying and unworthy of respect of interest.”