"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."
"'It's like wood,' Harry says, groping back through history, which is a tinted fog to him, marked off in centuries like a football field, with a few dates--1066, 1776--pinpointed and a few faces--George Washington, Hitler--hanging along the sidelines, not cheering."
“The world has never lacked for horrifying examples; but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes.”