It's amazing what you can convince yourself of, if you buy into the lie.

If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it.
And if you didn't, you will never understand.

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

'Morality has nothing to do with religion,' she says, 'You can do the right thing and not believe in God at all.'

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Drifting in and out of consciousness , I imagined that my mother was here. She wrapped her arms around me and kept me warm. She whispered in my ear: Be a Mensch, Minusa. For the first time I realized what that really meant. As long as you put someone else's welfare in front of your own, it meant you had someone else to live for. Once that was gone, what was the point?

My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardens shard of rock. This was certainly true of the deaths in my family - if only because they did not live to see me in this state, to see the world in this state.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

Anything is possible. Even the most terrible beast might one day be a distant memory.*