Important Quotations Explained
1. I
stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening
to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the
room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital
ward. . . . I wondered if little Mickey had ever seen sunlight come
though the windows of a front room apartment. . . . Somehow everything
had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around
seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.
2. “We
are commanded to study His Torah! We are commanded to sit in the
light of the Presence! It is for this that we were created! . .
. Not the world, but the people of Israel!”
3. “What
does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing
more than the blink of an eye? â I learned a long time ago, Reuven,
that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks,
that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives
that span, he is
something. . . .”
4. “[My
father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find
my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my
soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's
own pain â by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of
how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the
Master of the Universe.”
5. “We
shook hands and I watched him walk quickly away, tall, lean, bent
forward with eagerness and hungry for the future, his metal capped
shoes tapping against the sidewalk. Then he turned into Lee Avenue
and was gone.”
