“On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient.”

“I would rather carry around a plastic bag with five thousand Euro inside, than carry around a Louis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada bag with only one hundred Euro inside!”

“A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”

“It's better to practice one thing a thousand times, than practice a thousand things one time.”

“There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, there are thousands to prophesy failure, there are thousands to point out to you one by one, the dangers that wait to assail you, But just buckle in, with a bit of a grin, just take off your coat and go to it; just start to sing as you tackle the thing, that cannot be done and you'll do it!!”

“...he would tell stories about the Holy City, about Solomon, a just king, a poet-king, a monarch with a thousand concubines. We weren't quite sure what concubines were, but we guessed: a concubine ... Concubines! One thousand! One thousand women in all colours and shapes - but all of them sexy, of course - one thousand - one thousand raving beauties lying side by side on a bed (what a bed! How wide it must have been!), all of them smiling, all of them reaching out their arms, all of them saying something in Hebrew - but the meaning was unmistakeable - "Come here, sweety." One thousand women. If one were to spend twenty, or fifteen minutes with each one of them, how long would it take to...? A problem that our math teacher never assigned us for homework...!”