“For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

“People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.”

“Whenever something negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it.”

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

“This lesson was firmly in the minds of those who made the American Constitution. They proposed to adopt institutions under which the people should be supreme, and the government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. They were determined to be a sovereign people under a government having such powers as they from time to time should confer upon it by a written constitution. They did not propose to be under the tyranny of either the executive or the legislature.”

“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”

“Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.”

“Advice can never take the place of experience. That which advice can sometimes do is to make experience more fruitful of good; to help us the better to understand the lessons of life; and when those lessons are sharp and unwelcome, to bear them with an even and unruffled mind.”

“People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen.”