“It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.”

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”

“It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...”

“There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.”

“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn’t.”

“Meir, let me ask you something,” I said after a while.“Sure.”“Do you think I’m a bad person?”“Only God knows that for sure, Willy.”“So you don’t have an opinion at all?”“Not one that really matters.”“Okay, let me ask you something else. If the Polish peasant who hid Jews from the Nazis is a hero, what is the Polish peasant who turned the Jews away? Is he a coward?”Meir smiled, “Of course.”“Really? A coward? A bad man?”“A coward isn’t a bad man, necessarily. You can’t know if you’re a bad man until you die.”“You’ve got to wait until you hear god’s decision?”“Well, yes, that’s true. But I meant something else. Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good. Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around.”

“It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.”