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" Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self. "

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" In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed. "

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" Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied. "

" Chaste love happens all the time, far more frequently than adultery. "

" An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss. "

" There comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us. "

" Take away our things, and something in us dies. "

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" Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to. "

" Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off. "

" Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction. "

" Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft. "

" With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos. "

" What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on. "

" Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity. "

" Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps. "

" We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. "

" There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so. "

" I was born into a Turkish family that had acquired Italian citizenship. Many members of the family subsequently became British, French, Brazilian, and German, so there was a bit of everything. It was not uncommon for people in the family to speak seven languages: English, French, Ladino, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and even Greek. "

" Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future. "

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" Older students know what they want, which is good. "