"What would he give to be able to be, with a clear conscience, a homosexual, an artist, a cocaine addict - in general, an "ist", it doesn't matter what type - he even envied sportsmen's sports mania. And he was just a complicated metaphysical masochist."

"And yet it is good, everything is good. What? – maybe not? It's fine, damn it, and whoever says no, I'll punch him in the face!"

"I hate her for having to love her so much."

"I have never needed God in my life - from my earliest childhood, not even for five minutes - I have always been self-sufficient."

"And she sat at dinner, oh, mature in her immaturity, self-confident, indifferent and alone, and I sat for her, for her, for her I sat and I could not for one second not sit for her, I was in her, she contained me in her along with my mockery, her tastes, her tastes were decisive for me and I could please myself only insofar as I pleased her."

"It's the end, what a gas, And who's read it is an ass!"

"Why do most people who absolutely shouldn't stink do stink?"

"There are rumors about me, sucked from the big toe of someone's dirty leg."

"Monday - me, Tuesday - me, Wednesday - me, Thursday - me."

"I despise everyone and I am so disgusted with the intellectual rabble that it makes me vomit."

"Without students, there would be no school, and without school, there would be no life!"

"W porządnej kamienicy wypadki się nie trafiają."

"Bo zgodziłam się z życiem i kradnę to, co jest najmilszego. To jest szczyt mądrości."

"Oj, czasy! czasy nastały. Ani paszy dla bydła, ani uczciwości ludzkiej."

"A niech was wszyscy diabli!!!"

"Jeden Judasz drugiego za pieniądze sprzedaje."

"Gdzie widziałaś uczciwą kobietę z rudymi włosami?"

"Kobieta powinna przejść przez życie cicho i spokojnie."

"Dla męża, mój panie, kobieta się nie potrzebuje pod spodem stroić."

"Śmierć na wszystko pomoże."

"Każda kobieta to fortepian – tylko trzeba umieć grać."

"Moje sumienie jest czyste i nie boję się dnia białego."

": Niby to u nas nie ma kokot w kamienicy. Sama mamcia wynajmowała tej z pierwszego piętra. (z godnością): Ale się jej nie kłaniam. : Ale pieniążki za czynsz mamcia bierze od niej, że aż ha... : Przepraszam, ja takich pieniędzy dla siebie nie biorę. : A co mamcia z nimi robi? (majestatycznie): Podatki nimi płacę."

"Skromność – skarb dziewczęcia."

"Dla kobiety nie ma, jak dom."

"Ja tam nie mam czasu myśleć."

"Każdy samobójca musi być szalony i stracić poczucie moralności i wiary w obecność Boga."

"Wielka afera – zagoi się do wesela."

"A przestań się malować, bo wyglądasz jak kamienica odnowiona na przyjazd cesarza."

"Na to mamy cztery ściany i sufit, aby brudy swoje prać w domu i aby nikt o nich nie wiedział."

"Even when I’m not writing—and now is not a very productive time for me—I live with my writing and feel it is my anchor, my support."

"There are times in life when muteness is the only appropriate language."

"how can one speak of settling when your foundation has been ripped from under you? Nevertheless, one goes on."

"one’s style, one’s method of writing—these, I believe, truly reveal the face of one’s soul."

"Friday the first of September, at six o'clock in the morning, the Germans"

"Accompanied by my sister who had also survived the war, I wandered through all the zones of Occupied Germany. There was as yet no organized transportation system for civilians, so we hitched rides on the top of lorries loaded with coal, or on military trucks, but mostly we wandered on foot along with bands of other survivors. We made our way from the wreckage of one German town to the next. We hurried from one UNRRA office to the other, reading lists of survivors, searching for the name of our father and other dear ones."

"On my voyage back into the Ghetto, I wanted to take with me all the questions that had tormented me after the liberation. Why had the world learned nothing from our suffering? Were the Nazis only the most extreme example of the urge to do evil, or was the drive to destroy inherent in human nature? The Nazis were, for me, the most obvious channel through which the poison of hatred could flow freely—but the poison itself, where did it come from? What was its source? In writing about the Ghetto, I wanted to find that source. I wanted to discover the essence of our humanity, to touch upon the source, upon the core of the human soul and see it reflected in the soul of the Ghetto Jew, who had stood stripped of every shred of artifice and pretense necessary to leading a normal life. There, in the Ghetto, humans had faced humans without any embellishments or illusions. They had faced the brutality of their fellow human beings, as well as the knowledge of what that brutality meant to their own destinies. It was as if the dams of a river had opened within me and I became pregnant with the idea for my book. And so it was, that by the time I arrived in Montreal, I was doubly pregnant: pregnant with my daughter, who was born in Canada, and pregnant with my novel, which was born here as well, but many years later, when my daughter was already grown and my son was an adolescent. I called this novel about the death of the Jewish community of Lodz The Tree of Life."

"Writing is good therapy."

"a pair of eyes whose gaze spoke the language of stubbornness and determination. (chapter 1)"

"There were moments when he felt something soft, something acutely sensitive vibrating within him. He, who until now had been a 'surface' person, who had been able to call everything by its name with so much self-assurance, and who had had such a concrete sense of reality, began to feel uncertain and vague, to experience a bitter-sweet indeterminate craving, as if something crippled yet trembling with life was desperately trying to break through the thick icy core inside him, crying to come out. (chapter 1)"

"Nevertheless, I hold to my old romantic belief that writers of all times and places belong to a noble fellowship; that although they are the voices of their own cultures and languages, they transcend these boundaries. This belief helps me surmount my doubts as I reach out in my foreign language of English to the hearts and minds of the people among whom I live. I want to be accepted as an equal by my literary peers in this country, to be recognized as a writer who is both Jewish and Canadian. I want to come in from the cold."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization."

"If love is a mental disease, this behaviour of mine is one of its symptoms. (p76, Michal letter to Mira)"

"The family archives were filled with piles of documents reflecting not only the growth of the Zuckerman clan, but also that of the Jewish community in Lodz. And while still a gymnasium student, Samuel had liked to sneak into the cellar and browse among the dusty papers; he was drawn to them not so much by their content as by the breath of generations gone by that reached him through them. At that time, however, he had been too busy with his own growth, with his own pulsating young life, to summon patience for a serious study of his origins. Then he had been merely proud to be so deeply rooted in his city, and it was sufficient for him to know that he could prove the fact at any time. (chapter 1)"

"The first day of the year 1939 was an unfortunate one for Samuel as well. Someone had broken the big front pane of his office window, and on the wall by the entrance to his factory, was printed in thick black paint: JEW - TO PALESTINE! (p32)"

"Writing is a lonely profession, and after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers were doubly lonely."

"The crowd was in good spirits, convivial and singing, and for a while the troubles of the world seemed far away."

"Montreal in the 1950s was a marvel as far as Yiddish culture was concerned. It bustled with a lively intellectual and social life, was home to several important Yiddish writers, and boasted a Yiddish library and a system of private Yiddish-language day schools, to which I sent my children. But while I found in Canada a Jewish community that still spoke Yiddish, the focus of this community had turned away from the universalism of my European past to more specifically Jewish concerns, such as supporting the state of Israel. It was in Montreal that I wrote my novels, and I wrote them in Yiddish. I wrote in Yiddish because it was the language in which I was most at home; it was the language that I knew like the map of my own heart. I could create in no other language. And I wrote in Yiddish out of a sense of loyalty to the vanished world of my youth, out of a sense of obligation to a world that no longer existed. And yet, I hardly knew how it happened, but I gradually became aware that Yiddish was in trouble in Montreal and in the world at large, that the number of its speakers and readers was decreasing."

"Like most writers, I wanted to be read. But I also wanted the rest of Canada to know what I and millions of other Jews like me had lived through during those terrible war years. I wanted the non-Jewish world to recognize our pain, and I wanted to memorialize our vanished past and our lost communities. And so, I found myself once again face to face with the need to find a translator."