J. Dolan > J.'s Quotes

“Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.”
― Ogden Nash

“Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in the war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.”
― Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

“You know how much I used to like Plato. Today I realize he lied. For the things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but a product of human sweat, blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and the rocks for the imperial roads, we who pulled the oars in the galleys and dragged wooden ploughs, while they wrote dialogues and dramas, rationalized their intrigues by appeals in the name of the Fatherland, made wars over boundaries and democracies. We were filthy and died real deaths. They were 'aesthetic' and carried on subtle debates.
There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.”
― Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

“Birkenau simmered in the July sun like some hideous brew, a witch's potion of blood, sweat, smoke, and excrement worthy of something the weird sisters might have cooked up in Macbeth.”
― J. Michael Dolan, The Trumpets of Jericho

“Not that Baum had taken offense. Still, he had to wonder how many of his people had perished that day, or for that matter since he and Cyrankiewicz had sat down to talk. A dull, orange glow pulsed above the tree line to the north; the last of the Scharfuhrer's fire pits were dying out for the evening. Granted, a little unintended bigotry or even the occasional racial slur was something to be expected, and certainly no cause for high dudgeon. But to what extent, one had to ask, had such seemingly innocuous behavior led to the slaughter of children and the emergence of creatures such as Otto Moll?”
― J. Michael Dolan, The Trumpets of Jericho

“Death by malnutrition is one of the more agonizing there is. Essentially, it comes from the body feeding on itself, first its reserves of fat, then muscle and other tissue. In Q-Camp, Noah had begun to feel this very hunger, not that of a missed meal or even a few days of meals, but a silent and continuous scream from the body, a tortured cry every waking minute from every slowly dying cell, a demand that never ceased nor gave surcease from pain. It was the hunger that in its terrible, self-predatory alchemy transformed men into obscenities, into something not men.”
― J. Michael Dolan, The Trumpets of Jericho

“Menachem leaned to his right and spat. "There's that name again," he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. "Refresh my memory, will you, rabbi? Who the hell is this God you keep mentioning?"
Langfus responded as if to a legitimate question. "The one true God of our fathers. The God of Abraham and Moses."
"Oh.... Him," Menachem said. "Yes, I remember Him. He went away a while back, didn't He? For good it looks like, too. But He did leave a message, want to read it? It's written right here."
The boy pulled up his sleeve to reveal the five-digit tattoo.”
― J. Michael Dolan, The Trumpets of Jericho

“At Auschwitz, everything was either ass-backward or a corruption of itself. The Ten Commandments were turned on their head-- thou shalt kill, thou shalt steal, thou shalt covet-- the Golden Rule nonexistent. Here, the weak were at the mercy of the strong-- the lame, sick, and feeble treated not with kindness but contempt. Here, nothing was less valuable than the life of a human being; a crust of bread, a pack of cigarettes, a needle and thread were worth more. Women with children and the elderly were the first to die, not the last. Here, people went to the hospital to be killed, not cured.”
― J. Michael Dolan, The Trumpets of Jericho

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
― Winston S. Churchill