“If the price I have to pay to see Jewish children playing without an armed escort are freeways across the desert and a take-a-way on every street corner throughout the Middle East, then I’m all for it.”

“If the price I have to pay to see Jewish children playing without an armed escort are freeways across the desert and a take-a-way on every street corner throughout the Middle East, then I’m all for it.”

“Break break break On thy cold gray stones O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.”

“They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths todream of, rose-marble-fingeredWomen shed light down the great lines;But you have invoked the slime in the skull,The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Godslike racial dreams, the woman's desire,The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothingHuman seems happy at the feet of yours.Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in the gray oldyears in the evening leaningOver the gray stones of the tower-top,You shall be called heartless and blind.”

“Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone.”

“There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.”