Amy

“You mustn’t be afraid of the dark,” he said, gently grasping my arm and making me shudder. “Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.”
― Elie Wiesel, Dawn

“I remember, when I was a kid, staring at road maps, the kind you bought at gas stations and carried in the glove box, and that were, for me at least, impossible to properly refold. I remember looking at all those intersecting lines representing roads laid over and carved through the earth, dirt tracks and superhighways, the insolent grids of the cities. I wanted to follow them all to the end. I remember thinking that if you could get hold of all the maps for the entire country, or even the hemisphere, and spread them out side by side, it would be obvious that every road leads to every other road, that everything is connected. The dull suburban lane on which I lived would carry me eventually to rocky paths in Patagonia and the rutted logging roads that cross Alaska. There were dead ends, of course, lots of them, but assuming you were free to backtrack, it was impossible, really, to get lost. You could follow any road in any direction and eventually, by however circuitous a path, get where you needed to go. Oceans notwithstanding. I don’t remember talking to anyone about this. As a child you learn to guard your thoughts, to hold close to ideas that seemed simple and self-evident and that you knew adults would scoff at. What counted as education seemed to mainly involve learning to walk in single file and otherwise keep quiet. School meant grown-ups telling you that things had to be done in a certain way, and in no other, that however many obvious and inviting paths might lead from one point to another, only one of them was right. The rest might as well not exist at all. To do well, to earn praise, you had to learn not to see them anymore.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The silence of two people is deeper than the silence of one. Involuntarily”
― Elie Wiesel, Dawn

“The absolute quality of hate explains any human action even if it throws something inhuman around it.”
― Elie Wiesel, Dawn