Powerful, powerful, powerful: Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

15. I realized that one can live on anger.

16. I realized that one can live on indifference.

19. Both my physical and my spir...