“43. My couch is 92 inches; it’s a deep green three-cushion. It seats hundreds. But that’s not why I got it. I got it because, lying down the long way, in the spooning-in-front-of-a-movie way, in the head-to-toe lying with a pair of lamps burning and a pair of people reading, it fits me and another – it fits her – really well.”

“It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.”

“They went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent–ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power.”

“I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.”

“How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.”

“Čovjekovo pravo biće pokazuje se u tri slučaja. Kad je posrijedi novac, kad govori u srdžbi i kad je pijan.”

“Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.”