Source: Flight
“Just when I thought I was learning how to live, 'twas then I realized I was learning how to die.”
Interview with Oded Fehr http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/69_interview_with_oded_.htm (2001)
On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.
“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”
Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“If everything is done for me… how will I ever learn?”
Source: The Emperor of Nihon-Ja
“Dennis surfed. I couldn't surf. I never learned how.”
CNN interview (2004)
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)
Context: All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned. These are the things you already know:
