"Because Costello is his mother's maiden name, and because he has never seen any reason to broadcast his connection with her, it was not known at the time of the invitation that Elizabeth Costello, the Australian writer, had a family connection in the Appleton community. He would have preferred that state of affairs to continue" (781).

I love stories that start like this--setting up a bunch of mysterious circumstances immediately draws the reader in.

"As for Norma, she has never hesitated to tell him that his mouther's books are overrated, that her opinion on animals, animal consciousness and ethical relations with animals are jejune and sentimental" (781).

Interesting that a person with a Ph.D. in philosophy would have such a view.

"Under the circumstances of Hitler's kind of war, ignorance may have been a useful survival mechanism, but that is an excuse which, with admirable moral rigour, we refuse to except" (783).

Makes me think about what I would've done if I were a Nazi citizen during World War II. Accept the reality of what was going on? Turn a blind eye to it? Fight against it?

"...to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with" (784).

Powerful comparison; I still find it sick that the bodies of concentration camp victims were actually used to make soap.

This is a bar of soap from a concentration camp that was used by Jewish prisoners. Can you imagine washing yourself with something that was possibly made from the bloated, swollen corpses of your own family?

"On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. And if this is so, if that is what I believe, then why should I bow to reason this afternoon and content myself with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers" (784).

This is an interesting point. I've always taken the concept of reason for granted, never once considering that it might be a human artifice that we've created to help justify much of our universe.

"A Nazi obsession with genetic engineering and eugenics mirrors the way nonhuman animals are extensively exploited for such purposes now...." (818).

I've always found eugenics and human experimentation to be one of the most disturbing evils the Nazis participated in. Granted, such experimentation continues today on an even larger scale, just on animals instead of humans.

There's really no difference between these two images besides the species of the test subjects.