Davita's Harp Quotes

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering.

Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.

In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

Why has God not made man just as He wanted him to be?” he answered, “For the very reason that the duty of man is to perfect himself.

Law that is used to victimize the stranger, the one who is helpless—that is the law of Sedom and Amorrah.

I like his optimism,' I said. 'I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that just as the prophecy of the destruction of the temple was fulfilled, so the prophecy of the rebuilding would also be fulfilled. I like that.

Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.

Akiba was an ignorant shepherd, it said, and began to study when he was forty years old.

I had learned a strange lesson: walls are laws to some people, and laws are walls to others.

I told myself that each dawn was dimmed by what the sun had witnessed on its journey across bleeding Europe.