Great Throughts Treasury

"When they withdrew, next to me were two corpses, side by side, the father and the son. I was fifteen years old."

"Whenever I dreamed of a better world, I could only imagine a universe with no bells."

"When you see the abyss, and we have looked into it, then what? There isn't much room at the edge -- one person, another, not many. If you are there, others cannot be there. If you are there, you become a protective wall. What happens? You become part of it."

"Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way."

"Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows."

"Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe."

"Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty."

"Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?"

"Whose was that tear? Mine? His?"

"Why do you pray? he asked me, after a moment. Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? I don't know why, I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. I don't know why. After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him, he was fond of repeating. That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!"

"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."

"Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?"

"Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds."

"You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind."