"I didn't know how to respond. How do you say I'm sorry your father didn't love you enough(YEAH RIGHT) to your own dad? I couldn't, so instead, I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed."

"It was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something […] from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it from his son—and for so long."

"It was true of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman's fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn't believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn't honorable and good, I wasn't sure anyone could be."

"Sometimes you just need to go through a door."

"When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking."

"Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. I couldn't square my grandfather's idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he'd found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it. There was more left to explore, but suddenly it seemed like a waste of time; it was impossible that anyone could still be living here, even the most misanthropic recluse. I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth."

"A falling-down wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some ancient recluse who'd been surviving on ramen and toenail clippings since time immemorial, though no one realizes it until a property appraiser or an overly ambitious census taker barges in to find the poor soul returning to dust in a La-Z-Boy. People get too old to care for a place, their family writes them off for one reason or another—it's sad, but it happens."

"All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places humming with machines, not in heaps on the sodden reeking ground with ants marching over them, a brass letter opener clutched in one trembling hand."

"When I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After."

"Like the monsters, the enchanted-islands story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children's home that had taken in my grandfather must've seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn't really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they'd be hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough."

"My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late."

"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of those came as a terrible shock and, like anything else that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.""

"Sometimes the obvious is only wishful thinking."

"“You split hairs.” “Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.”"

"“Men afraid may see demons in the familiar, and direct their fear of the insensible to a fear of the sensible.” “Thought-lacking!” “So it is; but it is what folk do.”"

"She said nothing, but said it loudly."

"“I know my equations are true,” she mused aloud. “I need to know if they are fact.”"

"He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment."

"“Had you learned to flatter the Kaiser, you would need not live in the back woods.” “Had you learned to live in the back woods, you would need not flatter the Kaiser.”"

"One does not debate nature; one experiences nature."

"There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty."

"He read the document a second time, but the words had not changed."

"Much as I would tend my manor in peace, peace needs the consent of all, while one alone may raise a war. I swore an oath to protect the defenseless and punish peace-breakers, and that includes peace-breaking Herrenfolk. Your priests say to forgive your enemy, and that is well, or revenge follows revenge until eternity. But between a man who will stop at nothing and one who will hesitate at anything, the advantage is generally to the former. The pagans had right, too. It is a false peace to be overforgiving. Your enemy may read forbearance as weakness and so be drawn to strike."

"He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age."

"As often happens, fear showed itself in hostility."

"The philosophy of the likelihood of events concludes that folk from different worlds must have different forms."

"Philosophers will always have logical reasons for avoiding the good—and those reasons will always hang on their lust for material goods. A man who has little thinks little of sharing it; but the man who has much will clutch it with his dying fingers."

"The nag is as fat as a monk—and will stop to eat at every chance, so the resemblance is no happenstance."

"You have a grim taste in miracles, my friend."

"No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s."

"If people don’t leave a hole in your life when they are gone, Consuela, they were never in your life at all."

"This was an omen for sure, but one with no obvious meaning."

"He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness."

"What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity."

"But scouts, he told himself firmly, must observe what is, not what they wish to see."

"Cigars were for talk; pipes for reflection."

"Brilliance cannot improvise on faulty data."

"If one's enemies know where you are, no matter how well protected you are, you can be gotten."

"Nothing is more dangerous than a place of safety."

"The most effective lie is ninety-nine percent true."

"The man who shouts wins battles; the quiet man wins the war."

"Getting older... mostly it entails accepting the unacceptable."

"The faith is not the problem, the problem is the faithful."

"Once you open up a secret, it starts leaking out all over."

"At the moment of greatest fear, the best solution is to go boldly and without hesitation."

"The hardest bit of information to extract is the first piece."

"When Leslie spoke, the words rolled out so regally, you knew she was a proper queen. He could hardly manage English, much less the poetic language of a king."

"He felt there in the teachers' room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so. He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it."

"She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn't help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So smooth. The word "beautiful" came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up to his house."

"(Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) Katherine Paterson’s books — which were almost traumatizing to me as a kid, but which I appreciate now for challenging me and my worldview."