More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“And I gave up smoking at once,” he said, “because I loved the motorcycle so.” “We all cling to something,” I said. “To the wrong things—” he said, “and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe.” “All right,” I said. “All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”
On and on she would talk this way, with poor Heinz in the background, smoking his brains out. And one thing she did to me was made me deaf to all success stories. The people she saw as succeeding in a brave new world were, after all, being rewarded as specialists in slavery, destruction, and death. I don’t consider people who work in those fields successful.
“You’ve changed so,” she said. “People should be changed by world wars,” I said, “else what are world wars for?”
had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me! Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”
“You think there’ll be another one?” he said. “Another what?” I said. “Another war,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Me too,” he said. “Isn’t that hell?”
“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
She crooned something in German, made it sound like a fragment of a ditty remembered from a happy childhood.
What she crooned was this, a command she had heard over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz—had heard many times a day for years. “Leichenträger zu Wache,” she crooned. A beautiful language, isn’t it? Translation? “Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.” That’s what that old woman crooned to me.
Let there be nothing harmonious about our children’s playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.
They aren’t moving hand-carved animals on and off a Noah’s Ark, believe me. They are spying on real grownups all the time, learning what they fight about, what they’re greedy for, how they satisfy their greed, why and how they lie, what makes them go crazy, the different ways they go crazy, and so on.
