“Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?”
