Della

“One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia; to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one's wits, build up one's patience, strengthen one's will-power. Or else to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unexpected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die : as many as there are different human characters. All implied a weakening struggle of one against all, and a by no means small sum of aberrations and compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part of one's own moral world - apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune - was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of saints and martyrs.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul. 'Get up' : the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armour of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separate us from it : so that it is better to concentrate one's attention and desires on the block of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Equality is fine as a transitional demand, but it’s dishonest not to recognise it for what it is - the easy route. There is a difference between saying ‘we want to be included’ and saying ‘we want to reconstruct your exclusive system’. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race