Lora

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The War broke out, and our city and country became a part of Hitler's Imperium. For five and a half years we lived in a dimension completely different from that which any literature or experience could have led us to know. What we beheld surpassed the most daring and the most macabre imagination. Descriptions of horrors known to us of old now made us smile at their naivete. German rule in Eu­rope was ruthless, but nowhere so ruthless as in the East, for the East was populated by races which, according to the doctrines of National Socialism, were either to be utterly eradicated or else used for heavy physical labor. The events we were forced to partici­pate in resulted from the effort to put these doctrines into practice.
Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away.”
― Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”
― Markus Zusak

“He lay in bed with one of his sisters. She must have kicked him or muscled her way into the majority of the bed because he was on the very edge with his arm around her. The boy slept. His candlelit hair ignited the bed, and I picked him both and Bettina up with their souls still in the blanket. If nothing else, they died fast and they were warm. The boy from the plane, I thought. The one with the teddy bear. Where was Rudy's comfort? Where was someone to alleviate this robbery of his life? Who was there to soothe him as life's rug was snatched from under his sleeping feet?”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief