"She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half 'bogeret l'reshut nafsha'--an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived."

"Listen, I think movies serve many different purposes, from those movies that are frivolous and just an entertainment, to movies that just go to exploring the complexities of the human soul. Everything is valid if it's done with honesty and dignity, and I actually do both of those types of movies in my career."

"People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains."

"You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all."

"The tragedy of Hetty is a ‘collide’26 between the free will and male dominant society or nobility27 or religion. If her conduct is bad and cause of her tragedy then where is the tragedy of A.D. So as a moralist, GE demands a way for ‘Hetty like human beings’ in set society. Says Bhutta."

"That’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time."

"Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are all able to know everything, because it's all written there."

"Complete people gaze into the blue sky above, plunge into the center of the earth below, and run freely in the eight directions without even a change of mood."

"I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope."