“Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.”

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.

Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable-the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.

I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.

Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don’t cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears – you know, it’s a horrible thing.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

I wasn’t having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

I was not addicted to stealing in my youth, nor have ever been; yet such was the confidence of the Negroes in the neighborhood, even at this early period of my life, in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they were going on any roguery, to plan for them.

You have never had to steal my breath, or take it away, somehow you have always managed to convince me to hand it over freely.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

Good composers don’t borrow, they steal.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.