Nathan Englander

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one

The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival.

They went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent–ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power.

When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us."

It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.