Maybe Godot shows up in act three, my son; maybe the audience is just leaving too early. ESTRAGON: Where’d they all go? VLADIMIR: They were just here.

when someone rises up and promises that things are going to be better, run. Hide. Pessimists don’t build gas chambers.

Still, something about the store gave Kugel hope. All these remedies—plants, scents, vitamins, lotions—at least they were trying. They, too, were fighting back. With elderberry, sure, and shark cartilage. But fighting back was fighting, wasn’t it?

You’re going to scare him, Kugel said, looking deep into her eyes. Somebody has to, Mother replied.

On the contrary, my worry is that we will someday reach such an unsettling level of peace, such a level of happiness and joy, that we’ll engage in the most brutal war of all, a thousand Holocausts rolled into one, because peace frightens us. Expecting hell, we’re ill prepared for heaven.

Protecting a child from the outside world is easy, said Anne Frank as Kugel struggled to descend; his leg ached and he could only hold on, awkwardly, with his one good hand. Protecting him from his inner world, Anne Frank continued, is quite a bit more complicated.

he still couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, like old medicine bottles full of remedies that never worked but that you didn’t dare throw away on the off chance they would someday do what they promised, that you’d be stricken by chance with the one disease only they could cure, two weeks after they’d been pulled off the market.

THAT NIGHT, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Kugel thought he heard a gentle tapping on the vent, but decided that he hadn’t. Maybe he had. He hadn’t.

Why did children always draw the sun smiling? he wondered. It’s a giant ball of fire, kids. It’s rage and fury. Whatever it’s doing, it isn’t fucking smiling.