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When a disaster consumes five million victims, this does not mean anything: the number is empty. However, if I show a single, individual man in his perfection, his faith, his hopes and his difficulties, if I show you how he dies, then you will remember this story forever.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. Aldous Huxley
How could you not cry, the first time the light hits your eyes, or the first time you feel the dry brush of the air on your skin? How could you not cry when your lungs are filled with cold, unfamiliar oxygen, or when the soft sounds that used to reach your flooded ears arrive hard, unfiltered? How could you not protest when the world turns infinite and does nothing to contain the body that, until that day, had been so tightly held, so closely hugged in the dark softness of your mother’s interior?
children never learn as much as in the first three years of life. They learn, they live, but they never remember having learned or lived.
weather is never interested in war and never takes sides.
Heine wrote that where books are burned, it always ends in people being burned?”
After years of relative peace in the war, in the blink of an eye, her life had been reduced to that: to understanding that the only treasure worth anything is life.
Pride, like a beloved dinner set or inherited mirror, loses its value when you’re fighting for your life.
He was twenty-two, he calculated. And he was an old man. Where had his youth gone?
It had turned to dust, like everything else.
No matter how one pleads for peace, war never dies, Karl thought, certain that he was right. Wars leave wounds that can be reopened at any moment.
