Day Quotes

“Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn’t others. It’s ourselves. Hell is the burning fever that makes you feel cold.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Love that makes everything complicated. While hate simplifies everything. Hatred puts accents on things and beings, and on what separates them. Love erases accents.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“In fact, the question has haunted me for a long time: Does life have meaning after Auschwitz? In a universe cursed because it is guilty, is hope still possible? For a young survivor whose knowledge of life and death surpasses that of his elders, wouldn’t suicide be as great a temptation as love or faith?”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“If your suffering splashes others, those around you, those for whom you represent a reason to live, then you must kill it, choke it.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“He struggles to understand why fate has spared him and not so many others. Was it to know happiness? His happiness will never be complete. To know love? He will never be sure of being worthy of love. A part of him is still back there, on the other side, where the dead deny the living the right to leave them behind. His recovery will be a road into exile, a journey in which the touch of the woman he loves will matter less than the image of his grandmother buried under a mountain of ashes.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“I was lying. I would have to lie. A lot. She was ill. It's all right to lie to sick people.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Man is not defined by what denies him, but by that which affirms him. This is found within, not across from him or next to him.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Paradise is when nothing comes between the eye and the tree.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Those who, like me, have left their souls in hell, are here only to frighten others by being their mirrors.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“the dead didn’t need us to be heard. They are less bashful than I. Shame has no hold on them, while I was bashful and ashamed. That’s the way it is: shame tortures not the executioners but their victims. The greatest shame is to have been chosen by destiny. Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“The sound of the wind carries the regrets and prayers of dead souls. Dead souls have more to say than living ones.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn’t others. It’s ourselves. Hell is the burning fever that makes you feel cold.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“How can one cry out against a dream? How can one scream against the dying of the light, against life that grows cold, against blood flowing out?”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“I was thinking: to go far away, where the roads leading to simplicity are known not merely to a select group, but to all; where love, laughter, songs, and prayers carry with them neither anger nor shame; where I can think about myself without anguish, without contempt; where the wine, Kathleen, is pure and not mixed with the spit of corpses; where the dead live in cemeteries and not in the hearts and memories of men.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel—or else it is not about Auschwitz.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“...why should God be allied with death? Why should He want to kill a man who succeeded in seeing him? Now, everything became clear. God was ashamed. God likes to sleep with twelve-year-old girls. And He doesn't want us to know. Whoever sees it or guesses it must die so as not to divulge the secret. Death is only the guard who protects God, the doorkeeper of the immense brothel that we call the universe.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Everything had been said. The pros and the cons. I would choose the living or the dead. Day or night.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“you should know that the dead, because they are no longer free, are no longer able to suffer. Only the living can.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“The dead have no place down here. They must leave us in peace.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“He who doesn’t forget God isn’t cold in his grave,” she said. “What keeps him warm?” I insisted. Her thin voice had become like a whisper: it was a secret. “God himself.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“A man who has suffered more than others, and differently, should live apart. Alone. Outside of any organized existence. He poisons the air. He makes it unfit for breathing. He takes away from joy its spontaneity and its justification. He kills hope and the will to live. He is the incarnation of time that negates present and future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory. He suffers and his contagious suffering calls forth echoes around him.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“I'm serious," she said. "I read your articles. They are written by a man who has come to the end of his life, to the end of his hopes."

"That is a sign of youth," I answered. "The young today don't believe that someday they'll be old: they are convinced they'll die young. Old men are the real youngsters of our generation. They at least can brag about having had what we do not have: a slice of life called youth.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“All right, I told myself. I’ll also have to learn to eat. And to love. You can learn anything.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day

“Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead,” he said looking right through me. “It is man’s duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.”
― Elie Wiesel, Day