“At the age of twenty, I failed to grasp the difference between guilt, which can almost always be atoned for, and grief, which can only be borne.”

“Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”

“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.”

“Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.”

“Grasping at things can only yield one of two results:Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear.It is only a matter of which occurs first.”

“I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting myself into the future, clutching at and always failing to grasp the wisp of now.”