“Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. ”

“The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.”

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

“Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person.”

“Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. ”

“But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. ”