“What wounds you most,” writes Darwish, “is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’

A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

But for years after, as I turned the stories over in my mind, I could feel the revelations spinning out of them.

I thought I could stand apart, but looking back, I see that the parts of my thinking that were most reinforced were those that most dovetailed with those around me, and the parts that were hardest to hold were those that did not.

race is a species of power and nothing else.

What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the general through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me.

“We will make agreements with the devil to save Jews from persecution and to secure the future of this state.”

In a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research.