Here I Am Quotes
"Even putting aside the destruction of Israel, the timing was unfortunate."
"The difference between conceding and accepting is depression."
"You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of."
"Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death."
"While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment."
"Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you."
"People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good."
"Toasters don’t toast toast, toast toasts toast."
"Neither knew, only a few steps onto that invisible bridge, that it never ended, that the rest of their life together would require steps of trust, which only led to the next step of trust."
"Jacob chuckled. Julia changed into her 'fancy' pajamas. Jacob watched her, unaware of anything that had changed about her body in the decade since they’d last been there."
"Jacob brushed his teeth and thought, 'What if I don’t get hard?'"
"You already brushed? Julia asked. Jacob said, 'Beside you. Just a minute ago.'"
"Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control."
"Sam doesn’t remember screaming, 'Why did that happen?' as loud as he could, not out of terror, or anger, or confusion, but because of the size of the question."
"Sam’s dad said, 'You’re sure?' His mom insisted they get another opinion."
"In the other side of the screen by a knocking."
"Sam laughed. 'Absolutely true.' He logged off and spun to face Max."
"He remembered the game they used to play when he was a child: Where is Thumbkin?"
"Benjy let out a plaintive wail, and then, as if carried on a light beam from wherever she’d been, Julia opened the door and rushed in."
"Max looked to his mother. She closed her eyes, unwilling or unable to protect him as she did his little brother."
"So where to put it down? On the kids, of course."
"They held each other and shared a silence in the darkness."
"They didn’t recede from each other that night. They didn’t roll to opposite sides of the bed."
"Jacob touched a tapestry, a depiction of a naval battle beneath the bannered words 'The American Situation: War of 1812,' and said, 'Nice.'"
"Jacob turned off the lights, placed his unfolded glasses on the bedside table, and got into bed, beside his wife of a decade."
"Those minutes of hiding, of silent shame, had walls and a ceiling."
"They sought happiness that didn’t have to be at the expense of anyone else’s happiness."
"Their purest seeking was on Shabbat, when they closed their eyes and made their home, and themselves, new."
"I wish you’d known me when I was a kid," Jacob said.
"That architecture of minutes, when Jacob excused himself to the bathroom and Julia didn’t read the book she held, was their purest hiding."
"They went to bed, Julia in her nightgown, Jacob in his T-shirt and boxers."
"Jacob and Julia hid themselves inside the work that they hid from each other."
"I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m telling you the truth."
"It’s strange, because she’s convinced you wrote those words."
"I don’t believe that anger reveals truth. Sometimes you just say something."
"And they were always as boring as everyone anticipated."
"And at the center was the moment when Jacob carried him into the house, saying, 'Something happened,' and she saw more blood than there was but couldn’t hear Sam’s screaming."
"The sum of everything she hated him for would never surpass her love for him in that moment."
"Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do."
"You either never bomb, or you open yourself to bombing."
"Isn’t there some kind of Other Life mulligan, or something?"
"If God was everywhere, where did He put the world when He made it?"
"A young, ambitious, idealistic Israeli has many reasons to leave Israel."
"If there were a way to bomb Iran without bombing Iran, that would be good. Any other course will be bad."
"The more you buy, the more you have to sell."
"We live in a different apartment than the one you visited. We’re always moving."
"I have an assistant who has nothing to do with my business ventures but just helps with lifestyle things."
"I’m the one with a toilet that knows his name, and I’m the one with a refrigerator that does the shopping online."
"A body is only a body. But before he was a body, he was an embodiment."
"Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling."
"Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing."
"And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."
"Kein briere iz oich a breire. It means ‘Not to have a choice is also a choice.’"
"The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be."
"The older he got, the more he carried, the stronger it should have made him."
"Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do something."
"Despite being as agnostic about God's existence as he was about the question’s meaning, Jacob wanted Benjy to believe."
"She imagined the deaths of her air-filled clients and their dreams of heavier and heavier kitchen appliances."
"She remembered when Jacob suggested they select their own text to scroll into the mezuzah of the front door of their home."
"Tamir pointed at the TV. 'You need to come to Israel with me.'"
"A widow," Jacob said. "That's what you'll become. You're constantly projecting your needs and fears onto the kids, or me, or whoever is within reach."
"When he was no one, he was free to be himself."
"I don’t know how I could be any more sorry for what I did."
"You find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak."
"Because you’re always talking, and your words never mean anything."
"Your greatest secret is that you’re wall all the way to the centermost stone. There is nothing there."
"The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use."
"Our wedding. I walked seven circles around you, and I surrounded you with love, for years I did, and the wall toppled."
"The space where those clauses met was his home."