He knew that there could never be an apology enormous enough for what he had just said. He didn’t care. He was tired of people who told him what stat… - Lisa Goldstein

Claude sighed. “All right, you’re a poet,” he said. “I don’t understand why poets can’t make the effort to get along like everyone else.”
“Ah,” Robert said. “But we poets can’t understand why everyone else is making the effort.”

You are wrong, Rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To think about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live.

“It would make a good tourist attraction,” Mitchell said.
Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins, their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that right?”
Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much thought.
“But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist attraction. That would be one way we could finance the excavation.”
Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but when you need money for something we’re the first people you think of.