Julia

by Sandra Newman

She knew you didn’t name names if you could help it. It was as fatal to accuse those with protection as it was to defend those who had none.

Never mind if you sounded daft. Daft was good. Daft lived while clever died.

“My feelings don’t matter in the least. What matters is what’s true.”

It struck Julia that luxury was as much the absence of things as their abundance.

It is how a lump of coal is changed to a diamond, by pressures that deform and crush it. No diamond can be made without this violence. It is what a diamond is.

“All these horrors!” he said very tragically. “They finally come to seem quite normal.”

These people were dissatisfied with the scale of the violence, and muttered about the real reckoning to come. It was intolerable to them to think that an enemy existed who was not suffering. They instinctively worked to hate the enemy more, and to convince other people to hate them more.

There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime.

It makes no difference. Nobody cares what I am. I make no difference.

It really is the only thing—poetry. One feels that something has visited the world that isn’t of this world.”

There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved.

one had no choice, one must only live through it as if one had.