E. Merrill Brouder

“Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere.
For when the heart goes before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway,
Many things are made clear, that else lie hidden in darkness.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

“Can the dead really belong to anyone?”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“They had him. They just stood and watched him, each with the faint suggestion of that intolerable slow smile upon his face. They raised their eyes, un-speaking, looked at us as we rolled past, with the obscene communication of their glance and of their smile.

And he—he too paused once from his voluble and feverish discourse as we passed him. He lifted his eyes to us, his pasty face, and he was silent for a moment. And we looked at him for the last time, and he at us-this time, more direct and steadfastly.
And in that glance there was all the silence of man's mortal anguish. And we were all somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. We all felt somehow that we were saying fare-well, not to a man but to humanity; not to some nameless little cipher out of life, but to the fading image of a brother's face.
We lost him then. The train swept out and gathered speed-and so farewell.”
― Thomas Wolfe, I Have a Thing to Tell You

“Great is the power of humanity; humanity does not die until man dies. And when there comes a brief but terrifying period in history, a period in which the beast triumphs over man, to his last breath the man slain by the beast retains his strength of spirit, clarity of thought, and warmth of feeling. And the beast who slays the man remains a beast. In this immortal spiritual strength of human beings is a solemn martyrdom, the triumph of the dying man over the living beast. Therein, during the darkest days of 1942, lay the dawn of reason’s victory over bestial madness, of good over evil, light over darkness, of the power of progress over the power of reaction; an awesome dawn breaking over a field of blood and tears, an ocean of suffering, a dawn breaking amid the screams and cries of perishing mothers and infants, amid the death rattle of the aged. The beasts and the philosophy of the beasts foreshadowed the end of Europe, the end of the world; but people remained people. They did not accept the morals and laws of fascism, fighting with all the means at their disposal against them, fighting with their death as human beings.”
― Vasily Grossman, L'inferno di Treblinka