Recently added

It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, now she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.

My, but I miss the days when we never talked to each other for weeks at a time.

We become one tribe because we say we're one tribe.

Anthropology is never an exact science; the observer never experiences the same culture as the participant.

Once you know what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

It’s the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: to grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfill it. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, Only I will be great, and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing.

Ignorance and deception can’t save anybody. Knowing saves them.

[They] knew each other so well that there was often nothing to say. But without her there, [he] grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to.

I think you can’t possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.

There’s so much that we don’t understand. And so much more that you don’t understand. We should tell each other more.

Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

I’m not one to despise other people for their sins. I haven’t found one yet, that I didn’t say to myself, I’ve done worse than this.