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Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology—whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law—have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.
To live is a verb that makes sense only in the present tense.
Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That’s not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk—whose legs shake, but who carry on.”
Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”
But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature.
Peace is very demanding: It has to wipe out the effects of war as quickly as possible.
The armistice doesn’t make the amputated limbs of the mutilated grow back; it doesn’t cure the pain of the wounded; it doesn’t eradicate typhus; it doesn’t rescue the dying from their decline; it doesn’t return those who have marched on. Peace doesn’t cure everything, at least not that quickly.
A person waiting for you somewhere is like a match you strike at night in the countryside. It may not be able to light up everything, but it does show you the way back home.
The secret of being a child is the ability to create mirages in the desert and linger to play in them.
