Paul Geren, “Burma Diary”, July 30, 1942

To live is to be liable to sorry. All of us in the world are like a group moving over mountains together. The same peril stalks us all. When it touches any one of us it stirs a quality in him which lies deep, which is almost beyond knowing intellectually, which is assuredly beyond definition.

In whomever it is stirred, that one is akin to all other sufferers, with a kinship that cannot be sundered. In so far as people ever understand one another, this is the means of understanding. In tears our souls mingle.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry"

Trivial questions sometimes require deep and expansive knowledge of the cosmos just to answer them.

Chiam Potok, "The Promise"

Human beings don’t live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than a blink of an eye… I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of the eye itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man (or woman) who lives that span, (they) are something. They can fill that tiny span with memory, so that its quality is immeasurably.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.

Claudia Lars, "Tierra de Infancia"

Malo y bueno, mi hija, como todo en este mundo. La sombra y la luz son distintas túnicas de Dios, pero una sin la otra no podrían existir jamás ...

(Bad and good, my daughter, like everything in this world. The shadow and the light are distinct tunics of God, but one without the other could not exist ever ...)