The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia.
Life was something too great, and death also had something too great about it; they were not to be played with. Having courage was a different thing from having no fear; courage was consciousness of danger, fearlessness mere ignorance.
People become melancholic when they start thinking about life. They become cynics because they see what other people do with life.
Fate had struck while she sat unsuspecting, had struck somewhere on one of the many curves of this cursed course. The seconds became leaden, the minutes hours. The carrousel on the white ribbon existed now only like a bad dream; her chest became a black cavity, hollowed out with waiting.
It’s odd,’ she murmured, ’but as long as we don’t forget that we’re falling and falling, nothing is lost. Life seems to love paradoxes – when we think we’re perfectly safe, we’re always ridiculous and on the verge of a tumble; but when we know we’re lost, life showers gifts on us. Then we don’t have to do a thing – it runs after us like a poodle.
Das Licht war Gold und das Blau eine letzte, seidene Fahne des Sommers.
I loved her very much, and it seemed to me that I had never loved her more, even when possessing her, than in this sordid night full of snoring, punctured by the strange hissing sound of urine falling on coal.
I hadn’t failed, I had gained a second, heaven-sent life with Helen – and even the despair that had come to me and still haunted my sleep from time to time was possible only because there had been something else: Paris, Helen, and the unbelievable feeling of not being alone.
Safe in his cage,′ she repeated. ‘Who wants to be safe in a cage?
We have never been a very demonstrative family – poor people who have to work hard and cope with problems very rarely are.
It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.
There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best –.
There’s something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you are happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary. Happiness is a question of degree. When you know that, you are seldom completely unhappy.
The small tool of death was like a dynamo of life.
Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.
It makes very little difference where one lives, Kate. Some places are more comfortable than others, but it is never important. The only important thing is what one makes of it.
They were living corpses and died like flies in frost. The Small camp was full of them. They were broken and lost and nothing could save them – not even freedom.
The scene struck me as typical of the sinister, demonic mob spirit of our times, of all the frightened, hysterical crowds who follow slogans. It makes no difference whether the slogans come from the right or the left, as long as they relieve the masses of the hard work of thinking and of the need to take responsibility.
Many slept crouching and the lucky one was he whose bedfellows died in the evening. They were then carried away, and for one night he could stretch out until new arrivals came.
Wenn man so viele Tote gesehen hat, kann man so viel Schmerz um einen einzigen nicht mehr recht begreifen.