Craig

“If the Nazis required that humiliation precede extermination, then they admitted exactly what they worked so hard to avoid admitting: the humanity of the victim. To humiliate is to accept that you r victim feels and thinks, that he not only feels pain, but know that he's being degraded. And because the torturer knew in an instant of recognition that his victim was not a "figuren" bu a man, and knew at that same moment he must continue his task, he suddenly understood the Nazi mechanism. Just as the stone-carrier knew his only chance of survival was to fulfill his task as if he didn't know its futility, so the torturer decided to do his job as if he didn't know the lie. The photos capture again and again this chilling moment of choice: the laughter of the damned. When the soldier realized that only death has the power to turn "man" into "figuren", his difficulty was solved. And so the rage and sadism increased: his fury at the victim for suddenly turning human; his desire to destroy that humanness so intense his brutality had no limit.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low?”
― Salman Rushdie, Fury

“When it comes to love there's no telling what people will convince themselves of. In spite of all the evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface everyday.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist