“Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.”

“In that moment, he felt like the illusion that his family had become was held together only by the constellation of patterns left by the furniture feet set on a rug, by the runes formed in the shadows that the chair backs threw on the walls, and that once those things were moved or faded, he wouldn’t know who he was anymore.”

“Or how he was once found on the well regarded Rabbi's front lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum heel, and used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren.”

“The two brothers who sought to get their only family back, to feel her warmth, one lost his last family member and the other could never feel warmth again.The one who wanted her baby back lost chance of having one again,And the one who had a vision to see his country change became blind.”