1. Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly's confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather. 

2. Either way, everything will be fine. But if you have an opinion, please feel free to offer it to me through the gap in the door of the public restroom. Everyone else does. 

3. "We could make an omelet," I suggested. "We?" She smiled, handling me the carton, picking up her suitcase, waiting for me to open the door wide and let her inside. "One thing you should know about me, Lyova. I don't cook."

For some time now, David Grossman has been describing his writing as a means of survival, as a way of no longer feeling a victim in the "disaster zone" of the seemingly eternal conflict that is Israel-Palestine. At moments he has talked of the risk of dispassion, of being paralysed with fear and despair. With the publication of this extraordinary, impassioned novel, such purpose or hope acquires a new meaning and intensity. It now seems that the life to be saved by writing, even though the struggle may be doomed, could only be – perhaps always has been – the life of a child.

At 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, August 13th, the doorbell rang at the Grossman house. Over the intercom, a voice said, “From the town major’s office.” Michal had left the outside light on, in case of such a visit. As Grossman went to the door, he told himself, That’s it, our life is over.

In a note at the conclusion of his somber, haunting new novel, “To the End of the Land,” he explains that he began writing it in May 2003 — around the same time he wrote that introduction, six months before the end of his older son’s military service and a year and a half before his younger son, Uri, enlisted. “At the time,” he writes, “I had the feeling — or rather, a wish — that the book I was writing would protect him.”

1. It's about motherhood. This is first and foremost a book about being a parent -- and, perhaps even more specifically, being a mother. 

Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all the skiff.  - The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 

1. 
He had raised her from the dead and granted her the freedom of the living, had freed her to choose and to be chosen, and she had chosen him. As if life was a river and men its stepping stones, she had crossed the liquid years and returned to command his dreams. ..

"I have come home after all." she told him. "You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at my journey's end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours."

2. 
Jaslyn thinks again of an apricot- she does not know why, but that's what she thinks, the skin of it, the savor, the sweetness. 
The world spins We stumble on. It is enough. 
She lies on the bed besides Claire, above the sheets. The faint tang of the old woman's breath on the air. The clock. The fan. The breeze.
The world spinning. 

3.
The doctor's wife got up and went to the window. She looked down at the street full of refuse, at the shouting, singing people. Then she lifted her head up to the sky and saw everything white, it is my turn, she thought. Fear made her quickly lower her eyes. The city was still there.